Nonalcoholic liver steatosis (NALS) is a condition where fat infiltrates the tissue of the liver and accumulates in droplets. While not a dangerous condition on its own, if left for long enough it can develop into conditions which could cause serious and potentially permanent damage to the liver. One of the primary approaches for preventing NALS from progressing is through changes in diet and lifestyle. However, explaining to a patient the impact of such a change can be difficult, which hampers motivation in many instances. Digital twin technology can provide simulations of what will happen to the body after a lifestyle change, but the output data is very abstract and can thus be a challenge to convey properly to a patient. In this project I investigate a digital data visualization approach where a photo of a liver sample is morphed to showcase liver fat droplets shrinking as a result of a changed lifestyle, as simulated by the digital twin. The approach uses a simple image morphing algorithm that pulls pixel intensity values from regions designated by a morph field and composites a newimage from the updated values. By selectively choosing regions of interest to pull pixels towards or away from, with a ramping cutoff in morph field strength, it is possible to designate certain regions in the image to be morphed. The program is capable of generating time series of increasingly morphed images in both greyscale and truecolour, and it can save the time series as an animated .GIF file, with linear interpolation between the morphed images in the time series.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:liu-189422 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Gustafsson, Peter |
| Publisher | Linköpings universitet, Institutionen för medicinsk teknik |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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