Brachytherapy is a radiation therapy technique that is standard-of-care in treating gynecological cancers. At BC Cancer—Kelowna, patient-specific, 3D-printed applicators have been developed for treating malignancies that would otherwise be difficult to treat using standard, commercially available applicators. These patient-specific cylindrical templates (PSCTs) are manually designed and facilitate placement of needles within gynecological tumours (such as within vaginal and cervical tissues). These needles are used to guide a radiation source directly into the tumour, to deliver complete radiation dose coverage of the tumour while sparing nearby organs and tissues. Software has been developed at BC Cancer—Kelowna to simplify and automate the manual design process of these PSCTs, and currently exists as code bases written in Python. This is one of the two associated projects, within which there is some flexibility to tailor the project to the interests of the capstone group.
Brachify is a 3D modelling software which generates a 3D-printable PSCT model from a clinical planning file. The software ingests a DICOM file containing clinical information (tumor and organ geometry, manually planned needle trajectories, etc.), generates and displays a 3D model of the grometry, and allows the user to adjust features of the 3D printable model (needle path diameter, applicator dimensions, etc.). There is a need to incorporate additional functionality into the software, including the ability to visualize structures such as the tumour volume and neighboring organs. Additional desired functionality includes the ability for the user to modify needles (translation and rotation, adding or removing needles), save a needle or cylinder design as a template, import a template, and more. Open repository: GitHub repo link
Brachytherapy is a radiation therapy technique that is standard-of-care in treating gynecological cancers. At BC Cancer—Kelowna, patient-specific, 3D-printed applicators have been developed for treating malignancies that would otherwise be difficult to treat using standard, commercially available applicators. These patient-specific cylindrical templates (PSCTs) are manually designed and facilitate placement of needles within gynecological tumours (such as within vaginal and cervical tissues). These needles are used to guide a radiation source directly into the tumour, to deliver complete radiation dose coverage of the tumour while sparing nearby organs and tissues. Software has been developed at BC Cancer—Kelowna to simplify and automate the manual design process of these PSCTs, and currently exists as code bases written in Python. This is one of the two associated projects, within which there is some flexibility to tailor the project to the interests of the capstone group.
An auto-planning software is in development to automate the manual planning process for the aforementioned templates. This multicriteria optimization software determines the optimal placement of needles and the radiation source within them, to achieve conformal radiation dose coverage of the tumour while sparing nearby healthy tissue. Within this project there are opportunities to:
Navigating complex indoor/outdoor environments, such as university campuses, shopping malls, and airports, remains a persistent challenge. This challenge is even greater when time is limited and the environment is unfamiliar. Many existing solutions are costly, unreliable, or require a continuous network connection. Support for both indoor and outdoor wayfinding in large, complex buildings should be developed as a capstone project in COSC 499. The design and implementation of a cross-platform mobile solution should be investigated and tested. Furthermore, the system should support both online and offline modes. It should use a graph-based shortest-path algorithm, and it would be better to include an AI co-pilot.
Floor maps should be interactive, vector-based, and support both 2D and 3D visualizations. The system should use QR codes to assist with localization. This application should offer a cost-effective alternative to an infrastructure-heavy indoor navigation system and include free parking lot information from students and professors, with timestamps. It should be scalable, maintainable, and accessible. The initial maps for outdoor and indoor locations at Okanagan College, Kelowna campus will be provided. The application should also integrate Google Maps. The Digital Research Alliance of Canada provides computational and research infrastructure for the project. We expect to publish 1 or 2 research papers by the time you finish the project.
Thermaspire has completed prototype testing (TRL5) with positive results and is now developing a TRL7 pilot plant with an industry partner. This pilot is the subject of the proposed capstone project.
Thermaspire is seeking one or two capstone teams to design and build the control system software for our pilot plant. The pilot will be a physical, instrumented system requiring reliable automated process control, safety interlocks, and data handling. Thermaspire will provide a detailed control narrative describing the process, instrumentation, control logic, and required alarms/interlocks. Execution (architecture, implementation, and testing of the control system) will largely be led by the student team(s), with Thermaspire available throughout for process and engineering guidance.
The deliverables we are looking for include:
Thermaspire will supply the control narrative, process and instrumentation details, and ongoing subject-matter support for the duration of the project. We are happy to meet regularly with the team(s), participate in design reviews, and provide access to relevant equipment documentation. We see this as a genuine engineering collaboration and are excited to help the team learn about industrial process control along the way.
The goal is to develop a language learning game focused on numbers in another language. The game will be used by beginner language students at UBCO - Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, and Spanish. It will be a scavenger hunt-like game where the clues/cues are only given via sound - so students can practice listening in their target languages. It will involve users walking around campus (with their phones) to find the correct rooms and/or offices given numbers and simple descriptions in spoken format. Additional details: