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Recently, many groups have reported on the occurrence of brain shift in stereotactic surgery and its impact on the procedure. A shift of deep brain structures by only a few millimeters can potentially increase the number of required microelectrode and/or macroelectrode tracks. This can cause complications and potentially affect implantation accuracy. Detecting intra-operative brain shift and, more significantly correcting for it intra-operatively can thus impact the procedure and its outcome. In this study, we have used intra-operative stimulation response data to assess brain shift. Using a shift free functional atlas containing therapeutic response to stimulation (efficacy) data from a population of patients we build statistical efficacy maps on new patients. We then compare the information provided by the maps with the actual intra-operative responses of those patients to detect brain shift. Our preliminary results show that by maximizing the correlation between statistical maps and intra-operative observations, it may be possible to detect intra-operative brain shift and potentially correct for it.

This paper proposes a new method designed to track operative microscope video images recorded during tumor resection neurosurgery. Two steps are involved in this method. The first uses feature vectors constructed from color information of video images and shape information of selected vessels to find homologous points in consecutive frames. The second uses smoothing thin-plate splines (TPS) to interpolate the transformation computed with the vessels over the entire image. This approach only requires several pairs of starting and ending points selected on segments of vessels in the first frame of a video sequence. Then, the proposed method tracks the identified vessels automatically, rapidly, and robustly, even when surgical instruments obscure parts of the image frames.