Stereoscopic Analysis of Vascular and Neuroanatomical Data with Applications in Functional Stereotactic Neurosurgery

An efficient applications of functional stereotactic neurosurgery requires the removal of some major limitations related to the 3-D nature of the information, the strong variability between human brains and the difficulty to find correspondence between neuroanatomical data and their functional properties. To achieve this goal an interdisciplinary research project has been established a few years ago to develop suitable software tools for computer assisted stereotactic neurosurgery. The paper describes the main results of this study as well as the short-term program under development at the Neurosurgical Department of Milano. The different steps of the research are described in more details starting from 3-D reconstruction of a neuroanatomical Atlas and the representation of the individual cerebral structures through skeleton description, in order to allow 3-D matching of the tomographic records of the patient. Quite recently functional data has been also included into this model. Moreover, stereoscopic analysis of digital angiograms is performed with simulation on the com puter of the surgical probe trajectory, so that to estimate the optimum path for the surgical operation.