Panagiotis Foteinos, Andrey Chernikov and Nikos Chrisochoides.

Poster in IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics & Biomedicine, accepted, refereed, November, 2009

In image guided neurosurgery, Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) obtained before the procedure (pre-operative) provide extensive information which can help surgeons to plan a resection path. Current practices of neurosurgical resection involve the opening of the scull and the dura. This results in a deformation of the brain (known as the brain shift problem) which creates discrepancies between the pre-operative imaging data and the reality during the operation. A correction is possible using non-rigid registration of intra-operative MRI with pre-operative data. In this project, we target Finite Element (FE) based approaches for non-rigid registration. Real-time Image-to-Mesh (I2M) conversion is a critical component for FE-based non-rigid registration of brain images. I2M conversion should address three issues that affect the speed of registration: 1) fidelity: how well the mesh boundary resembles the image boundary, 2) quality: how small the dihedral angles of the mesh elements are, and 3) size: number of elements.