Multimodal connectivity based eloquence score computation and visualisation for computer-aided neurosurgical path planning

Non-invasive assessment of cognitive importance has been a major challenge for planning of neurosurgical procedures. In the past decade, in vivo brain imaging modalities have been considered for estimating the ‘eloquence’ of brain areas. In order to estimate the impact of damage caused by an access path towards a target region inside of the skull, multi-modal metrics are introduced in this paper. Accordingly, this estimated damage is obtained by combining multi-modal metrics. In other words, this damage is an aggregate of intervened grey matter volume and axonal fibre numbers, weighted by their importance within the assigned anatomical and functional networks. To validate these metrics, an exhaustive search algorithm is implemented for characterising the solution space and visually representing connectional cost associated with a path initiated from underlying points. In this presentation, brain networks are built from resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and deterministic tractography. their results demonstrate that the proposed approach is capable of refining traditional heuristics, such as choosing the minimal distance from the lesion, by supplementing connectional importance of the resected tissue. This provides complementary information to help the surgeon in avoiding important functional hubs and their anatomical linkages; which are derived from neuroimaging modalities and incorporated to the related anatomical landmarks.