Brain Tissue Modeling

Image-guided minimally invasive brain surgery is an very active field of research in medical imaging. As known, a whole human brain consists mainly of grey matter, white matter, cerebrospinal fluid, fat, skull, and skin. So, modeling of the brain tissue deformation is a very complicated process. Our goal is to building accurate mathematical models to characterize the brain deformation for surgical planning and real time monitoring of surgical operations. 

Research Team
Aly A. Farag CVIP Director farag@cvip.uofl.edu
Hongjian Shi Research Assistant hshi@cairo.spd.louisville.edu
Methods
The human brain consists mainly of cerebrospinal fluid, white matter and grey matter, and they are distributed in a complicated way inside the brain. Multiple domain mesh generation techniques and the description of the mechanical properties are relatively difficult in comparison with single component tissue such as liver tissue. In the modeling, we try to overcome these problems to find an accurate brain deformation models so that it is beneficial to the image-guided minimally invasive brain surgery.
 

Results
Brain deformations from the linear elastic model and the proposed FEM model: the first twos show the brain deformation and the deformation contour using the linear elastic model, the second twos show the brain deformation and the deformation contour using the intensity and region-of-interest based model:

Publications
H. Shi and A.A. Farag, “Intensity and Region-of-Interest Based Finite Element Modeling of Brain Deformation,” Proc. of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery, Chicago, June 23-26, 2004, pp. 373-377.

Acknowledgement / Sponsors
We would like to thank the University of Louisville for its sponsorship.