Patient-Specific Real-Time Segmentation in Trackerless Brain Ultrasound
This addresses the problem of improving surgical outcomes for neurosurgeons by enabling more accurate and adaptable tumor segmentation during brain surgery.
The authors tackled the challenge of interpreting intraoperative ultrasound (iUS) for brain surgery by developing the first patient-specific framework for real-time brain tumor segmentation in trackerless iUS, which outperformed non-patient-specific models, neurosurgeon experts, and high-end tracking systems.
Intraoperative ultrasound (iUS) imaging has the potential to improve surgical outcomes in brain surgery. However, its interpretation is challenging, even for expert neurosurgeons. In this work, we designed the first patient-specific framework that performs brain tumor segmentation in trackerless iUS. To disambiguate ultrasound imaging and adapt to the neurosurgeon's surgical objective, a patient-specific real-time network is trained using synthetic ultrasound data generated by simulating virtual iUS sweep acquisitions in pre-operative MR data. Extensive experiments performed in real ultrasound data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, allowing for adapting to the surgeon's definition of surgical targets and outperforming non-patient-specific models, neurosurgeon experts, and high-end tracking systems. Our code is available at: \url{https://github.com/ReubenDo/MHVAE-Seg}.