Intraoperative Visualization of
White Matter Tracts During
Brain Tumor Resection
Haytham Elhawary, Ph.D
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
March 19th 2010
Intraoperative DTI
Objectives
• Increased survival is associated to increased tumor
resection in both high and low grade gliomas
• Minimize neurological deficits, so functional and
anatomical information is required: fMRI, DTI, T1w, T2w
• Relation between white matter tracts, normal brain
tissue and tumor
• Objective is to develop a system that can allow
visualization of white matter tracts in real-time during the
intervention
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Intraoperative DTI
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Intraoperative DTI
Methods
• Tracked surgical tool from a navigation system sent to
3D Slicer
• VVLink and OpenIGTLink used to transfer data from
Brainlab system to 3D Slicer
• Tool tip location used to create a fiducial point to seed
DTI dataset using tractography. White matter tracts are
visualized only in the surgical tool tip region
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Intraoperative DTI
Haytham Elhawary; Haiying Liu; Pratik Patel; Isaiah Norton; Laura Rigolo; Xenophon Papademetris; Nobuhiko Hata;
Alexandra J. Golby, “Intra-operative Real-time Querying of White Matter Tracts during Frameless Stereotactic
Neuronavigation”, Neurosurgery, under review
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Intraoperative DTI
Haytham Elhawary; Haiying Liu; Pratik Patel; Isaiah Norton; Laura Rigolo; Xenophon Papademetris; Nobuhiko Hata;
Alexandra J. Golby, “Intra-operative Real-time Querying of White Matter Tracts during Frameless Stereotactic
Neuronavigation”, Neurosurgery, under review
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Intraoperative DTI
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Intraoperative DTI
Haytham Elhawary; Haiying Liu; Pratik Patel; Isaiah Norton; Laura Rigolo; Xenophon Papademetris; Nobuhiko Hata;
Alexandra J. Golby, “Intra-operative Real-time Querying of White Matter Tracts during Frameless Stereotactic
Neuronavigation”, Neurosurgery, under review
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Intraoperative DTI
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Intraoperative DTI
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Intraoperative DTI
Future Work
• Overlay DTI visualization on to the microscope view
(although there are some problems)
• Eliminate the BioImage Suite connection to reduce
points of failure
• Be able to pre-select only relevant clinical white mater
tracts for visualization
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