For my senior design project the powers that be have decided that it needs to include AI in some capacity (basically because its a buzzword). They want me to locate the femoral artery from ultrasound video/image data. I tried to explain to them that doppler already does this very well in real time, so ideally we'd just buy a DSP and I'd implement existing assembly/C code provided by TI for doing doppler, no need for AI. Unfortunately they're too scared to let me try to build a basic ultrasound device, and they also insist on having AI (an extremely broad term), so I'm going have to use some type of AI on still images from the US video video feed, and write a program that the client could theoretically implement on Ultrasound device if they had a custom one built themselves.
I have access to sample raw signal data from random websties that I can open in Matlab (not of the femoral artery yet though), but I'm not sure if this data would be useful for AI, so for now I think I'll stick with normal images (although I'm definitely open to using raw signal data). Mainly because even if I use image data, I still have to be able to explain how my program would work on raw signals (I doubt you can do real time image process on jpegs). I've heard that Matlab has some features for machine learning, but I'm still determing whether or not that's the type of AI I should use (I have no experience in artificial intellgience beyond programming miniMax tic tac toe in Java). I'm not taking an AI class until next semester, but I still have to start working on this now.
I've been planning on using Matlab for the project in some capacity because in my experience it's the best software for scientific image processing, however I have never used it for anything related to AI (or done anything related to AI in general). I've never worked with ultrasound data in matlab either, my background in using it is mainly to write scripts for MRI reconstruction software and process MRI volumetric image data.
I'm wondering if people in here think Matlab would be an appropriate tool to use for parts of a project like this, and where I should get started on learning how to incorporate artificial intelligence programs/data in Matlab for image processing. I know I'm being kind of vague, but I just found out I had to do this yesterday and I'm still trying to think through what I'm even supposed to have as an end product. I have 8 months, so hopefully I have a decent amount of time to plan this and learn the underlying concepts well enough to get something decent done.
If it sounds like this is a really strange/non specific thing to tell someone to do it's because an ER doctor told our team to do this, not an engineer. I still have no choice in the matter though.
