Abstract. We present a software package which uniquely integrates several facets of image-guided medicine into a single portable, extendable environment. It provides capabilities for automatic registration, semiautomatic segmentation, 3D surface model generation, 3D visualization, and quantitative analysis of various medical scans. We describe its system architecture, wide range of applications, and novel integration with an interventional Magnetic Resonance (MR) scanner to augment intraoperative imaging with pre-operative data. Analysis previously reserved for pre-operative data can now be applied to exploring the anatomical changes as the surgery progresses. Surgical instruments are tracked and used to drive the location of reformatted slices. Real-time scans are visualized as slices in the same 3D view along with the pre-operative slices and surface models. The system has been applied in over 20 neurosurgical cases at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and continues to be routinely used for 1-3 cases per week.
Abstract. This paper describes image processing techniques for Diffusion Tensor Magnetic Resonance. In Diffusion Tensor MRI, a tensor describing local water diffusion is acquired for each voxel. The geometric nature of the diffusion tensors can quantitatively characterize the local structure in tissues such as bone, muscles, and white matter of the brain. The close relationship between local image structure and apparent diffusion makes this image modality very interesting for medical image analysis. We present a decomposition of the diffusion tensor based on its symmetry properties resulting in useful measures describing the geometry of the diffusion ellipsoid. A simple anisotropy measure follows naturally from this analysis. We describe how the geometry, or shape, of the tensor can be visualized using a coloring scheme based on the derived shape measures. We show how filtering of the tensor data of a human brain can provide a description of macrostructural diffusion which can be used for measures of fiber-tract organization. We also describe how tracking of white matter tracts can be implemented using the introduced methods. These methods offers unique tools for the in vivo demonstration of neural connectivity in healthy and diseased brain tissue.
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