Use of a Mixed-Reality System to Improve the Planning of Brain Tumour Resections: Preliminary Results

Abstract

The lack of intuitive visualization techniques for neurosurgical planning is a challenging hurdle faced by neurosurgeons and neurosurgery residents. Within this context, this paper describes the development and evaluation of an Augmented Reality (AR) system geared towards planning brain tumour resection interventions. Successful resection of a tumour or hematoma requires careful pre-operative planning to avoid damaging the brain. We hypothesize that our proposed AR system facilitates the planning of tumour resection operations by making more effective use of the visuospatial abilities of individuals to assess patient-specific data. To test our hypothesis, a number of experiments were conducted where subjects were asked to perform relevant spatial judgment tasks using three different conventional visualization approaches as well as the proposed AR system. Our preliminary results indicate that, compared to traditional methods, the proposed AR system a) greatly improves the user performance in tasks involving 3D spatial reasoning about the tumour relative to the anatomical context, b) reduces error associated with mental transformation, and c) supports generic spatial reasoning skills, independent of the sensory-motor tasks performed.