2008 IGT Project Week Neurosurgical Planning and Simulation

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Team:Michel Audette, Andinet Enquobahrie

Goals:

• Path specification and descriptive anatomical modeling, based on surgical approach.
• Slicer-based methods for brain modeling for SOFA simulation.
• Meshing issues specific to the brain.

Approach:

Results: IGT Project Week led to a meeting between myself (Michel), Andriy Fedorov and Nikos Chrisochoides of William and Mary, as well as Jean-Jacques Lemaire, on specifications for maximally coarse brain meshing, based on the assumption that the mesh should be separable where relevant to the surgery. Dr. Lemaire also emphasized two new requirements, 1) that the mesh should, at least at the finest level representation, provide information about fascicle orientation on the basis of DTI, and 2) that it should be used if possible towards dynamic planning by experts, and not only in interactive simulation for training novice surgeons.

A preliminary set of results will be produced by myself, Andriy Fedorov, and Nikos Chrisochoides' group at William and Mary, prior to the MICCAI deadline, and we plan that this mesh will be usable over the SOFA platform, which will soon feature GPU-based nonlinear Total Langrangian Explicit Dynamics, or TLED, whose release is planned for March 2009. Our short-term goal is to do a proof of concept with GPU-based linear FEs, currently available on SOFA, with a simple joystick, and use this as a springboard to obtain a descriptive haptic device as well as fund multigrid meshing. The kind of cutting envisioned by Dr. Lemaire will be implemented in the longer term, probably in conjunction with the availability of XFEM-based cutting on SOFA.