An evaluative tool for preoperative planning of brain tumor resection

A patient specific finite element biphasic brain model has been utilized to codify a surgeon's experience by establishing quantifiable biomechanical measures to score orientations for optimal planning of brain tumor resection. When faced with evaluating several potential approaches to tumor removal during preoperative planning, the goal of this work is to facilitate the surgeon's selection of a patient head orientation such that tumor presentation and resection is assisted via favorable brain shift conditions rather than trying to allay confounding ones. Displacement-based measures consisting of area classification of the brain surface shifting in the craniotomy region and lateral displacement of the tumor center relative to an approach vector defined by the surgeon were calculated over a range of orientations and used to form an objective function. The objective function was used in conjunction with Levenberg-Marquardt optimization to find the ideal patient orientation. For a frontal lobe tumor presentation the model predicts an ideal orientation that indicates the patient should be placed in a lateral decubitus position on the side contralateral to the tumor in order to minimize unfavorable brain shift.