Visualization and planning of neurosurgical interventions with straight access

Image-guided neurosurgical interventional procedures utilize medical imaging techniques to identify the most appropriate path for accessing a targeted structure. Often, preoperative planning entails the use of multi-contrast or multi-modal imaging for assessing different aspects of patient's pathophysiology related to the procedure. Comprehensive visualization and manipulation of such large volume of three-dimensional anatomical information is a major challenge. In this work we propose a technique for simple and efficient visualization of the region of intervention for neurosurgical procedures. It is done through the generation of access maps on the surface of the patient's skin, which assists a neurosurgeon in selecting the most appropriate path of access by avoiding vital structures and minimizing potential trauma to healthy tissue. Our preliminary evaluation showed that this technique is effective as well as easy to use for planning neurosurgical interventions such as biopsies, deep brain stimulation, ablation of brain lesions.