Preliminary Results Comparing Thin Plate Splines with Finite Element Methods for Modeling Brain Deformation during Neurosurgery using Intraoperative Ultrasound

Brain shift compensation attempts to model the deformation of the brain which occurs during the surgical removal of brain tumors to enable mapping of presurgical image data into patient coordinates during surgery and thus improve the accuracy and utility of neuro-navigation. We present preliminary results from clinical tumor resections that compare two methods for modeling brain deformation, a simple thin plate spline method that interpolates displacements and a more complex finite element method (FEM) that models physical and geometric constraints of the brain and its material properties. Both methods are driven by the same set of displacements at locations surrounding the tumor. These displacements were derived from sets of corresponding matched features that were automatically detected using the SIFT-Rank algorithm. The deformation accuracy was tested using a set of manually identified landmarks. The FEM method requires significantly more preprocessing than the spline method but both methods can be used to model deformations in the operating room in reasonable time frames. Our preliminary results indicate that the FEM deformation model significantly out-performs the spline-based approach for predicting the deformation of manual landmarks. While both methods compensate for brain shift, this work suggests that models that incorporate biophysics and geometric constraints may be more accurate.