Visualization Of 3D Brain Atlases For Neurosurgery

Three-dimensional visualization of brain atlases is an advanced technology that is very important to brain surgery navigation system, as a vital role in the positioning and surgical planning. In the traditional stereotactic brain surgery, the doctor could only read the anatomical atlas from paper and mostly depend on the experience to complete the complicated surgery positioning which leads to high failure rate and extreme long time to finish the surgery. So the research of three-dimensional visualization of brain atlases attracts more and more anatomists'attention. But, some of those researches are based on two-dimensional atlas, and some other are based on three-dimensional atlas, while researches combine both two-dimensional and three-dimensional atlas are very few. Therefore, a study that satisfied the Chinese demand and can combine 2D and 3D atlas is not only the needs of clinical research, but also an urgent requirement for education and teaching.Based on the demand and background described above, we analyzed and discussed the process of the visualization of the 3D brain atlas in this paper. Our research used MVC as its design pattern, and an atlas named Talairach as its standard atlas. In order to reduce the larger gap between each slice of the data, it firstly applied nonlinear interpolation on digitized 2D TT atlas and pre-registered it into a referenced MRI data with defined AC-PC coordinate. Meanwhile, it applied Fast Marching and Morphological Reconstruction segmentation to the same referenced MRI data to create a 3D atlas. Hence the two atlases are mediate registered together. Then, the dissect names of the ROIs (Regions of Interest) are labeled according to the gray values of the atlases. Finally, the 3D visualization of the atlases is implemented and it is integrated into the neurosurgical operating system.As discussed in this paper, the system is mainly used for clinical surgical navigation, the accuracy and efficiency of the system is very important. In this research, we selected 32 patients'brain atlas to have a test. The results of experiment show that the system fully meets the requirements of the clinical needs, especially the speed of labeling is less than 0.003s which makes the eye can feel. The main achievements are list as following:1. It created a brain atlas which displays both in 2D and 3D. In the existing system, there are a few systems which can display both in 2D and 3D. In this paper, the system can labeling, scaling or rotation the ROIs from axial view, sagittal view and coronal view. And according to need, it can also show the 3D structure of ROIs.2. It can label the ROIs of the 2D brain atlas. And after testing, the speed of identification ROIs is less than 0.003s.3. In order to avoid doctor's repeat operation caused by the patient's respiratory, we use non-linear registration in these two data which reduce surgery time.