[GSOC 2023 Contributor] Implement UX principles to improve InVesalius usability

[TranHuuNhatHuy]

Hello Invesalius mentors - @vhosouza , as well as @paulojamorim and @tfmoraes ,

Please call me Tran. I am currently a 4th-year student at Tokyo Institute of Technology. I'm proficient in Python, also have some experiences in computer vision field, especially object detection and ADAS-related development.

I am really interested in the project of Implement UX principles to improve InVesalius usability, as my desired career path heavily involves software design/planning besides software development, as well as I have extensive description and documentation skills obtained through my research and internship experiences. Also, I am aiming for a lab focusing on biomedical imaging for my Master course next year. All of these make Invesalius, especially this project, perfectly fits me, and I believe I am gonna learn a lot from this, benefiting my Master course and future career.

After some literature/code reviews, I would like to have several questions:

1. In the first deliverable of "Description and documentation of the neuronavigation workflow", as far as I know, the neuronavigation has several purposes, some of them are:

• Visualizing the brain during surgery planning.
• Precisely locating parts of the brain during surgery.
• Helping surgeons to precisely tracking neurosurgical instruments (such as TMS coils) during surgery.
  So, do we also involve those activities listed above during development of our neuronavigation workflow?

2. If the answer for (1) is yes, to what extent should we involve them (for example, adding more functionalities to support those activities, but this might require us to develop compability with certain hardware utilities)? Or we just keep Invesalius mainly for 3D reconstruction and image processing (segmentation, measurement, etc) for MRI stuffs?
3. By the word "neuronavigation", I assume we are targeting brain-related activities. But I also saw DICOM images of bones (skull, clavicle, etc.) being used as well. Are we also include them in a generic workflow, or just the brain?
4. In the second deliverable of "Refactored neuronavigation user controls and settings", based on the 3 questions above, could you share me some ideas about which UX problems should be addressed/refactored?

Thank you so much for reading this. I really look forward to your response. I am quite determined to work on this project as I can learn/exchange a lot about biomedical techniques, practice software design and of course doing some meaningful stuffs as well. However it seems there are not much discussions about this topic up until now, so I also sincerely hope you mentors are still interested about this topic...

[vhosouza]

Dear @TranHuuNhatHuy,
Thank you so much for your interest in our project, specifically to this task. Here is some answers to your questions:

1. Yes, we involve the steps you mentioned in the process, although slightly different than what you described. The neuronavigation feature in InVesalius, at the moment, is designed specifically to guide a non-invasive brain stimulation method called Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS). Therefore, none of the procedures are done during surgery. You are right that neuronavigation is widely used in neurosurgery, but in our application it is focused to TMS.
2. For the task Implement UX principles to improve InVesalius usability we will add only UI functionalities that makes the use of the software easier and faster for the operator. There is no need for hardware implementation and we will be focused on UI improvements (brain reconstructions, image processing, buttons, dialogs, tabs, etc..)
3. We also include other types of images, for instance skin, because that's crucial in the neuronavigation process.
4. One example is: the settings of several navigation functionalities, such as camera calibration, coil registration, fiducial collection, etc.. they are all distributed in several tabs and the user needs to be jumping across tabs when performing neuronavigation. With this GSoC task, we want to reorganize the UI controls in optimal locations providing the user with a faster and easier-to-learn workflow, for instance, moving certain functionalities to a specific Settings dialog, and so on..

I'd be glad to receive and take a look at your application. Please, let me know if you have further questions.

[TranHuuNhatHuy]

Thank you Mr. @vhosouza for these information. I will plan my project content/schedule based on your suggestions, as well as prepare my application accordingly. I really look forward to discussing with you more about this project.

[ayushkoli772]

Hi there @vhosouza. I'm Ayush, a Third Year Student pursuing Computer Science Engineering. Any updates on this project? I'm interested in UX development and I think I will be suitable for this project. I'm new to open source contributions and haven't used InVesalius previously but I'm confident in my UI/UX skills and I'm open to learn new stuff while getting acquainted with new tech. Thanks :)