Visual Perception and Cognition in Image-Guided Intervention

Surgical image visualization and interaction systems can dramatically affect the efficacy and efficiency of surgical training, planning, and interventions. This is even more profound in the case of minimally-invasive surgery where restricted access to the operative field in conjunction with limited field of view necessitate a visualization medium to provide patient-specific information at any given moment. Unfortunately, little research has been devoted to studying human factors associated with medical image displays and the need for a robust, intuitive visualization and interaction interfaces has remained largely unfulfilled to this day. Failure to engineer efficient medical solutions and design intuitive visualization interfaces is argued to be one of the major barriers to the meaningful transfer of innovative technology to the operating room. This thesis was, therefore, motivated by the need to study various cognitive and perceptual aspects of human factors in surgical image visualization systems, to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of medical interfaces, and ultimately to improve patient outcomes. To this end, we chose four different minimally-invasive interventions in the realm of surgical training, planning, training for planning, and navigation: The first chapter involves the use of stereoendoscopes to reduce morbidity in endoscopic third ventriculostomy. The results of this study suggest that, compared with conventional endoscopes, the detection of the basilar artery on the surface of the third ventricle can be facilitated with the use of stereoendoscopes, increasing the safety of targeting in third ventriculostomy procedures. In the second chapter, a contour enhancement technique is described to improve preoperative planning of arteriovenous malformation interventions. The proposed method, particularly when combined with stereopsis, is shown to increase the speed and accuracy of understanding the spatial relationship between vascular structures. In the third chapter, an augmented-reality system is proposed to facilitate the training of planning brain tumour resection. The results of our user study indicate that the proposed system improves subjects\u27 performance, particularly novices\u27, in formulating the optimal point of entry and surgical path independent of the sensorimotor tasks performed. In the last chapter, the role of fully-immersive simulation environments on the surgeons\u27 non-technical skills to perform vertebroplasty procedure is investigated. Our results suggest that while training surgeons may increase their technical skills, the introduction of crisis scenarios significantly disturbs the performance, emphasizing the need of realistic simulation environments as part of training curriculum

Trends in Cerebrovascular Surgery and Interventions

This is an open access proceeding book of 9th European-Japanese Cerebrovascular Congress at Milan 2018. Since many experts from Europe and Japan had very important and fruitful discussion on the management of Cerebrovascular diseases, the proceeding book is very attractive for the physician and scientists of the area

Neurovascular Surgery

This open access book presents the diagnosis, investigation and treatment of neurovascular diseases, and offers expert opinions and advice on avoiding complications in neurovascular surgery. It also covers complication management and post-operative follow-up care. The book is divided in to three parts; the first part discusses common approaches in neurovascular surgery, describing the steps, indications for and limitations of the approach, as well as the associated complications and how to avoid them. The second part addresses surgical treatment based on pathology, taking the different locations of lesions into consideration. The third part focuses on the technological developments that support neurovascular surgery, which may not be available everywhere, but have been included to help vascular surgeon understand the principles. This book is a guide for young neurosurgeons, neurosurgery residents and neurosurgery fellows, as well as for medical students and nurses who are interested in neurosurgery or are associated with this field in any way. It is also a useful teaching aid for senior neurosurgeons

Full Issue: Volume 13, Issue 1 - Winter 2018

Full Issue: Volume 13, Issue 1 - Winter 201

Neurovascular Surgery

This open access book presents the diagnosis, investigation and treatment of neurovascular diseases, and offers expert opinions and advice on avoiding complications in neurovascular surgery. It also covers complication management and post-operative follow-up care. The book is divided in to three parts; the first part discusses common approaches in neurovascular surgery, describing the steps, indications for and limitations of the approach, as well as the associated complications and how to avoid them. The second part addresses surgical treatment based on pathology, taking the different locations of lesions into consideration. The third part focuses on the technological developments that support neurovascular surgery, which may not be available everywhere, but have been included to help vascular surgeon understand the principles. This book is a guide for young neurosurgeons, neurosurgery residents and neurosurgery fellows, as well as for medical students and nurses who are interested in neurosurgery or are associated with this field in any way. It is also a useful teaching aid for senior neurosurgeons

Vascular Malformations of the Central Nervous System

Vascular malformations of the central nervous system are important pathologies that could present with abrupt onset hemorrhage resulting in devastating neurological deficits. Current knowledge of their biology and natural history is increasing. Diagnostic modalities help clinicians to better evaluate the individual cases, and to decide the best treatment options. Treatment alternatives are various and all treatment options should be evaluated before choosing the final therapeutic modality. The purpose of this book is to review the current knowledge about vascular malformations of the central nervous system and to evaluate the treatment alternatives

Finite Element Modeling Driven by Health Care and Aerospace Applications

This thesis concerns the development, analysis, and computer implementation of mesh generation algorithms encountered in finite element modeling in health care and aerospace. The finite element method can reduce a continuous system to a discrete idealization that can be solved in the same manner as a discrete system, provided the continuum is discretized into a finite number of simple geometric shapes (e.g., triangles in two dimensions or tetrahedrons in three dimensions). In health care, namely anatomic modeling, a discretization of the biological object is essential to compute tissue deformation for physics-based simulations. This thesis proposes an efficient procedure to convert 3-dimensional imaging data into adaptive lattice-based discretizations of well-shaped tetrahedra or mixed elements (i.e., tetrahedra, pentahedra and hexahedra). This method operates directly on segmented images, thus skipping a surface reconstruction that is required by traditional Computer-Aided Design (CAD)-based meshing techniques and is convoluted, especially in complex anatomic geometries. Our approach utilizes proper mesh gradation and tissue-specific multi-resolution, without sacrificing the fidelity and while maintaining a smooth surface to reflect a certain degree of visual reality. Image-to-mesh conversion can facilitate accurate computational modeling for biomechanical registration of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in image-guided neurosurgery. Neuronavigation with deformable registration of preoperative MRI to intraoperative MRI allows the surgeon to view the location of surgical tools relative to the preoperative anatomical (MRI) or functional data (DT-MRI, fMRI), thereby avoiding damage to eloquent areas during tumor resection. This thesis presents a deformable registration framework that utilizes multi-tissue mesh adaptation to map preoperative MRI to intraoperative MRI of patients who have undergone a brain tumor resection. Our enhancements with mesh adaptation improve the accuracy of the registration by more than 5 times compared to rigid and traditional physics-based non-rigid registration, and by more than 4 times compared to publicly available B-Spline interpolation methods. The adaptive framework is parallelized for shared memory multiprocessor architectures. Performance analysis shows that this method could be applied, on average, in less than two minutes, achieving desirable speed for use in a clinical setting. The last part of this thesis focuses on finite element modeling of CAD data. This is an integral part of the design and optimization of components and assemblies in industry. We propose a new parallel mesh generator for efficient tetrahedralization of piecewise linear complex domains in aerospace. CAD-based meshing algorithms typically improve the shape of the elements in a post-processing step due to high complexity and cost of the operations involved. On the contrary, our method optimizes the shape of the elements throughout the generation process to obtain a maximum quality and utilizes high performance computing to reduce the overheads and improve end-user productivity. The proposed mesh generation technique is a combination of Advancing Front type point placement, direct point insertion, and parallel multi-threaded connectivity optimization schemes. The mesh optimization is based on a speculative (optimistic) approach that has been proven to perform well on hardware-shared memory. The experimental evaluation indicates that the high quality and performance attributes of this method see substantial improvement over existing state-of-the-art unstructured grid technology currently incorporated in several commercial systems. The proposed mesh generator will be part of an Extreme-Scale Anisotropic Mesh Generation Environment to meet industries expectations and NASA\u27s CFD visio