Computer Vision News - December 2020

Nazim Haouchine is a post-doctoral fellow at the Brigham and Women's Hospital and the Harvard Medical School in Boston. He spoke to us ahead of his oral presentation to support neurosurgeons with a specific problem encountered when performing craniotomy. To remove a tumor from the brain, a neurosurgeon needs to first open the skull. This operation is called a craniotomy. Before surgery, patients have an MRI scan, so the surgeon can understand where the tumor is and how to access it. However, in the operating room (OR), a phenomenon called brain shift can occur where the brain deforms, which means everything that was planned before the operation is no longer valid. Marta Kersten-Oertel , a Canadian scientist, told Computer Vision News a couple of years ago that the brain has parts that you can work on and other parts that you absolutely should not touch. “Exactly,” Nazim agrees. “I know the work by Marta Kersten-Oertel and ours is closely related . You must be precise. You have to avoid vessels and risky areas and access the tumor without damaging the brain .” This work explores how pre-operative planning can be updated in real- time to consider intraoperative brain shift, without the need for additional scanning and in the simplest way possible so that it can be applied generally around the world. “Our core idea was to use cortical vessel s,” Nazim explains. “These are vessels that are visible on the surface of the brain and are strong features from a computer vision point of view. You also have them on the MRI, so if you extract them, you can work with them to perform a graph registration 2 Paper Presentation 0 Deformation Aware Augmented Reality for Craniotomy using 3D/2D Non- rigid Registration of Cortical Vessels Nazim Haouchine Best of MICCAI 2020