4-shank gui angles are broken?

[nsteinme]

@petersaj (or @takacsflora ?)

The 4-shank gui is awesome - thanks for making that!! But I am either confused about the angles, or else they are maybe not working properly. It seems that "spin" does not spin around the green shank, but instead spins around a vertical axis? And when this happens, the other angles get messed up? Here's what I'm seeing.

First thing I do is place the probe on a diagonal by using shift+right 10x and shift+up 10x.

Side note here that the definitions of angles appear to have changed - under the old definitions this would have been 45 degrees from midline - is there documentation about what the definitions of "from midline" and "from coronal cut" now mean? I think "from coronal cut" is pretty close to 90 minus "from horizontal" that we used to have, is that it?

Now I add a 45 degree spin with alt+arrow:

I think you can see that it rotated the whole probe around a vertical axis by 45 degrees, rather than rotating the three blue shanks around the green one. Is this the intended behavior? It makes it difficult to pick a trajectory - you can't aim for your brain region and then pick a spin after you get there - instead, you have to pick a spin first and then aim for your brain region, because otherwise your spin will move you somewhere else entirely.

Maybe more critically, I think the angles are really confused now. You can see that we're supposed to be -10 from coronal cut - but the green shank is exactly in the coronal plane! And we're supposed to be -10 from midline, but again I can't figure out what that could refer to.

Sorry if I missed some documentation about this. Thanks for working on it!

[petersaj]

@takacsflora wrote that GUI - Flora: let me know if you want help cleaning up these issues or if they're quick fixes. I also changed the way the angle controls work in the single-shank GUI because it made more intuitive sense to a bunch of users, so if fixing the current issues are a bunch of work it might make more sense for you/us to build a 4-shank mode/separate GUI off the current single-shank version.

[takacsflora]

Hi both, great to know that someone else is using the 4-shank version. I think I pushed a fix for the spin issue, and will talk to Andy about the definitions in a sec (I indeed never understood what horizontal and midline mean in the original gui)

[nsteinme]

Great thanks! Could I suggest that the gui be able to report the old "from horizontal" and "from midline" angles - even if you have to click a button to see them, or even if you give them different names - because these are what you need to measure when you're actually going for the insertion (at least for the manipulator systems I've used), so I do think it is valuable to have them available, even if they aren't the main reported angles at the top of the screen.

[nsteinme]

any progress on the angles here @takacsflora ?

[takacsflora]

Hi Nick, it is not so straightforward to update as I have used cartesian coordinate system for all angle computations -- I will let you know once it is done.

[takacsflora]

Hi, I have changed the angles, @nsteinme, could you let us know if these are seem intuitive to you too? Thanks!