Software Development Projects

Pastoral Statistical Database System (PSDS), 2003

Dr. Jun Ni, Ph.D. and Dr. Larry Shostrom, Ph.D.

Project Summary: This project is to create a database management system (DBSM) at Spiritual Services Department at UNiversity of Iowa Helath and Clinic of the University of Iowa. Dr. Larry, is the project leader and Dr. Jun Ni is the project technical leader.. This purpose of this DBMS is to track the daily activities of each chaplain, and generate reports according to the users’ demand. The central entity of the database is CHAPLAIN table. Each category of activity is stored in a set of tables. The database is implemented in Microsoft Office Access 2003. The forms are created using Visual Basic 6.0, and the reports are built in Microsoft Office Access 2003.


 

Classic Piano Database System (CPDS), 2003

Hanrong Tang and Dr. Jun Ni, Ph.D.

This database system archives thusands of information about piano piecies for piano players and piano note collections. It contains detailed information about each piano pices, composor, music resources, and anthology.

VoluMeasure, 2002-2005

Dr. Jun Ni, Ph.D., Dr. Ge Wang, Ph.D., Dr. Simon Kao, M.D., Lili Huang, and Wenli He

Volume estimation by manually tracing regions of interest (ROI) within cross-sectional images is time-consuming. There is a great demand for computer scientist and radiologist to commonly develop a user-friendly, portable, platform-independent, cost-effective, and efficient tool to calculate a volume of ROI for research, education, and clinical use. We developed a software tool called voluMeasure that basically uses (1) a grid-point counting stereological method and (2) Java programming language to enhance the software’s feasibility, applicability, and portability. VoluMeasure has a novel and user-friendly interface. It imposes an adjustable grid on the images. The volume defined by the ROIs is estimated interactively by semi-automatic computer-counting of points within the ROIs . Selected points on an image can be carried forward onto the next image for higher efficiency. Multiple-selection layers and volume rendering are supported. The selection results can be saved and replayed for further analyses. The measurement times are recordable for performance evaluation. The software is compact (<100 KB) and can be installed on any standard personal computer. VoluMeasure provides radiologists with a valuable clinical, educational, and research tool. The techniques used in this project reflect the state-of-the-art software engineering, and unlock the power of the modern PC system for radiological imaging-based volume measurement. VoluMeasure, a practical computed aided program can be used to measure the volume of an anatomic/pathological structure defined by any imaging modality. This method is efficient, and can produce similar reproducibility and accuracy to those more complicated methods for volume calculation. VoluMeasureTM, implemented in the JAVA programming language, has a user-friendly graphical interface, is computer platform-independent. These attributes qualify it to be used as a clinical, research, and educational tool for various users, especially radiologists.

VoluMeasure Software was exhibited at RSNA, Dec. 2002
 

Thalamus Thalamus Atlas, 2002

Authored by Dr. Igor Ilinsky and Dr. Kristy Kultas-Ilinsky, Department of Anatomy, College of Medicine, and Boyd Knosp, ITS Academic Technologies-Research Services

Technically developed by Dr. Jun Ni, Ph.D. M.E., and Lili Huang and

This atlas is designed for the use in stereotactic surgery on monkey thalamus and analysis of experimental results where a thorough knowledge of the topography and relationships of thalamic nuclei is required. The atlas was constructed from a series of sagittal, Nissl- stained sections of the thalamus from an adult Rhesus monkey (Macaca mulatta). The software is developed using Java and the software was published by Klawa Academic Publisher in 2002. The software is programmed by Java.