The 2010 IEEE Visualization Contest, which will be held at the IEEE Visualization 2010 in Salt Lake City, USA (24.10.2010 - 29.10.2010), targets the field of multimodal visualization for neurosurgical planning. The primary challenge in planning neurosurgical interventions lies in the identification of the various structures at risk and understanding how they relate and interact with each other.
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The most relevant risk-structures are functional areas located in the gray matter on the cortex and white matter fibre tracts connecting different areas. During surgery, both need to be treated with equal care. Damaging a functional area or a connecting WM tract will result in serious patient impairment.
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Therefore, the task in neurosurgical planning is to identify all related risk-structures, their spatial relation to the lesion that's target to resection, as well as a safe access path to that lesion. Multimodal visualization should support the surgeon in performing this task.
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With its powerful capabilities of displaying and identifying a variety of functional and structural properties of the brain, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has changed the face of modern neurosurgery. It has become the most powerful tool for preoperative imaging of the brain.
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The contest aims at demonstrating how novel visualization and interaction techniques from the fore-front of scientific research can help to solve real-world problems of high relevance - today.