Employing Spatial Indexing for Flexibility and Scalability in Brain Biopsy Planning

Zusammenfassung

Planning of deep brain tumor biopsy is a time intensive task and the result highly dependent on tumor position and patient individual anatomy. The decision on the best needle trajectory is generally based on expert knowledge on optimal entry points and angles as well as trajectory length and rigid rules in respect to avoidance of and safety margins to risk structures. The increasing availability of more detailed data on brain anatomy further increases the complexity of the planning task. However, current computer supported planning systems generally work with fixed rules and a limited set of structures at risk. We propose BrainXPlore, a visual analytics based planning tool allowing neurosurgeon to interactively explore and refine the space of possible trajectories in the context of different quality measures and to define custom rules. To ensure interactivity and performance even for a high number of anatomical structures, we employ a spatial index allowing to access distance information for trajectories in real time. We evaluated BrainXPlore on real brain biopsy planning tasks and conclude that our system can decrease the time needed for biopsy planning and aid novice users in their decision-making process.