Automated MRI driven image guided robotic brain surgery

Surgical planning and decision making are the key towards successful surgical operations. The state of the art image guided surgery and intra operative MRI provide a complete and comprehensive picture of the navigational space by accurately localizing tumors or lesions and assessing their extents. However the surgery is still 'decided' and 'executed' by human surgeons. The paper proposes a novel approach for an automated MRI driven image guided brain surgery. An expert system based on the surgeons' surgical planning approaches was developed. The optimal path for tumor resection based on minimizing the surgical effort and penetration area was computed. A series of experiments were conducted to validate the methodology developed.