Image Registration in Ultrasound-Assisted Brain Surgery

Abstract

Image registration is an essential step in the image guided brain surgery. A preoperative magnetic resonance (MR) image guides the neurosurgeon about the size and the location of the tumor inside the brain of the diseased person. Due to several reasons, brain shift occurs during the surgery, results in the shift of the actual position of the tumor. Intra-operative MR imaging is expensive and may not be financially viable for many hospitals. An effective intraoperative US can be used in replacement of MR. For performing registration of US and MR images, the most of the state-of-the-art methods use a suitable similarity or dissimilarity measure, a spline based deformation model, a smoothing technique and an effective fast optimization method. This chapter starts with a discussion on various types of brain tumors and their clinical significance. It also covers on various similarity measures, optimizations and the available database of US and MR brain images.