Project Group Number 42: Clinical Database for Brain Images

Group Number 42

Team: Aaron Zhong, Brian Shen, Leianne Roylo, Yu (Albert) Jiang

Our group consists of four students, three CSE majors (Aaron Zhong, Leianne Roylo, and Yu Jiang) and one EE major with specialization in radio signals (Brian Shen).  The mentor for our group is Dr. Nicolás Phielipp.

The aim of our project is to help Dr. Phielipp and his colleagues monitor electrodes implanted in patients' brains from Deep Brain Stimulation surgery.  The goal requires us to efficiently and legally handle brain scan images.  To do so, we need to create a convenient, and automated solution to incorporate CT and MRI brain scans from an isolated local hardware system into a secure accessible database through methods that are compliant to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) standards.

DBS is a treatment used for treating neuromuscular symptoms.  It is a common treatment for Parkingsons Disease (PD) and other neuroligcal causes for tremors, stiffness, and movement problems.  DBS works by surgically implanting a tiny electrical lead into the brain that uses electrical currents to stimulate and/or block brain activity that controls movement.  In doing so, it gives the patient much more regular movement capabilities by either enhancing neuromuscular control or reducing neuromuscular tremors.  

This project is targeted specifically towards the ROSA machine which does the DBS surgery and takes CT and MRI scans for the surgery.  The solution for this project consists of a Raspberry Pi that is able to communicate with the ROSA via USB.  The Raspberry Pi device deidentifies the patient information from the CT/MRI images by utilizing a hash.  After deidentification, the information is wirelessly transmitted to a database where it can be stored and queried.  The processing, transmission, and storage of patient data will all be HIPAA compliant with the hash based patient information deidentification.  

September: Get clarification and approval from ROSA technician.

October: Get clarification and approval from UCI database team.

Novemember: Create working software prototypes.

December: Start software development.

Januaray: Finish software development and start hardware development.

February: Finish hardware development and start testing.

March: Finish testing and finish product.

Currently we have gotten clarification and approval from both the ROSA technician and the UCI database team for our project plans.  We also have initial working software prototypes for stand-in data, and we are building out new prototypes for mock data that is as close to the real data as possible.