Interdisciplinary Initiatives Program Round 1 - 2000

Helen Bronte-Stewart, Neurology
Jean-Claude Latombe, Computer Science
Christopher Bregler, Computer Science
Eugene Alexander, Biomechanical Eng.

Chronic high frequency stimulation (Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS)) of the sensorimotor region of the Globus Pallidus interna (GPi) in the brain has led to dramatic improvements in the involuntary movements of primary generalized dystonia. The challenge is to determine the optimal site in the deep nuclei of the basal ganglia for placement of the DBS electrode without harming nearby structures.

The proposed solution is a marker-less vision based algorithm capable of recovering the motion of deforming objects without prior knowledge of their 3-D shape. The first part of this BIO-X project dealt with the development and initial experiments on marker-less 3D tracking and model acquisition of non-rigid motion in video sequences. The technique was specifically targeted to human motion, which is a challenging domain. From the apparent motion of the pixels (optical flow), computed with this technique, the non-rigid 3D structure was derived.