Multimodal visualization for neurosurgical planning
CMPS 261
Spring 2010
Uliana Popov
Description:
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.
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 white matter tract will result in serious patient impairment.
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.
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.
For this project I will use cases. Each contatins different types of MRI scans (flair, T1, T2, DT-MRI...).
Goals:
To demonstrate a method or process for understanding this data through analysis and visualization. In order to be able to answer the next questions:
- What is the relation between the lesion, functional areas and white matter tracts?
- How can the lesion be accessed most safely?
- How close is the tumor located to vital functional areas, such as the visual, language or motor-system?
- What is the distance between the tumor and the pyramidal tract (motor), the arcuate fasciculus (associated with language processing) or the nervus opticus (vision)?
- Does the tumor infiltrate or displace any of these tracts?
- To what extend or how radical may a resection be performed?
- Which arteries or veins lie on the chosen access path?
Timeline:
Start Date
Task
04/18
Read papers. Choose which approach, technique I'd use to solve the problem