Atlas guided neurosurgery

Placement of N bars around the head of subject during an MR or a CT imaging session provides physicians and neurosurgeons with an analytical ability for preoperational target position determination in surgical planning. Since axial slices yielded by the system mentioned above has 9 N bar spots, where the actual length between them is known, determination of the position of a point can be calculated by N bar points with respect to any pre-selected origin. Even though, X-Ray CT and MRI are both complex, developed imaging modalities, neither of them can be defined as perfect because of their limitations. Namely, MR imaging is fine for soft-tissue filming, which makes it a strong candidate for neurosurgeries, where detailed imaging is important. Here, CT is not as good as MRI. On the other hand, MRI is limited due to, mostly, chemical shift, field non-uniformity, for preoperational target determination, hence CT imaging becomes more appropriate for such a purpose. Our goal is to integrate brain atlases and CT images to overcome the drawbacks mentioned above by developing a tool providing the neurosurgeon with a preoperational, target determination method by the atlas and CT image registration capability of the tool.