Intraoperative Accurate Automatic Modeling of Skull Defects with Neuronavigation System

Reconstruction and repair of skull defects is a very important step for the prognosis of patients in skull base surgery. However, different surgical approaches will cause different surgical defects for patients, and it is difficult to accurately reconstruct the three-dimensional (3D) structure of the skull defects for complicated structures approaches such as the trans-eyebrow approach. This study aims at proposing a method with surgical navigation system for accurately and instantly obtaining the structure of skull defect resulting from craniotomies, which is important for skull repairing. CT scanning is completed and the skull is segmented in the preoperative operation plan. After completing the craniotomy approach operation, the surgeon uses the surgical probe to trace along the edge of the skull defect while the navigation system records the three-dimensional coordinates of the probe tip in real time, and the direction of the main view direction is also recorded. With above information, the structure of defect skull can be reconstructed automatically according to the preoperative segmented skull information. The method using the preoperative image scanning data and intraoperative navigation data to get the structure of the defect skull is accurate and rapid.