Augmented-Reality (Ar) Assisted Neuronavigation for Transcranial Focused Ultrasound Brain Treatment Guidance

The current clinical brain surgery has widely utilized the neurosurgical navigation to guide surgical operation to assist physicians to precisely guide surgical tools for neurosurgical treatment. In recent years, augmented reality technology is getting matured and starts to enter the medical market. The clinical adoption of augmented reality technology should greatly improve the hand-eye coordination clinics during clinical neurosurgery, assist in the guidance of operation, and provide additional information to the patients of stereoscopic space in order to improve the accuracy of judgment in the operation of clinicians. Current high-intensity focused ultrasound thermal ablation may relies on magnetic-resonance temperature sensitivity to assist focused ultrasound energy guidance. However, magnetic resonance imaging is less convenient for most brain surgeries and fails to deliver energy-guiding efficacy in other nonthermal ultrasound treatments. The integrated research project aims to establish an integrated technology platform for augmented reality and surgical navigation in order to improve and optimize the current neurosurgical interventions. Specifically, the purpose of this research project is to establish a surgical navigation system combined with augmented reality, and to apply this system to the guidance of focused virtual ultrasound energy and deliver the transcutaneous ultrasound energy to the brain. During the actual treatment, the user can use the head-mount display device to integrate and correct the space coordinates through the integration of the surgical navigation and calibration, so that the ultrasound energy beam can be precisely displayed in space and the treatment operator can simultaneously observe the test object, 3D anatomical information, and can focused ultrasound beam concurrently, and therefore have the opportunity to solve the current limitation of the guidance obstacles of the virtual focused ultrasound energy. In addition, the scheme will test its utility on an epileptic animal model, performs ultrasound neuromodulation by operating this platform technology and demonstrates its feasibility as a tool for abnormal epilepsy suppression. It is expected that the implementation of this project will enable the development of a novel ultrasound treatment platform that will address the current difficulties in guiding the treatment of energy-guided ultrasound and accelerate the clinical application of non-invasive low-energy brain ultrasound therapy.

Project ID:PB10707-0607
External Project ID:MOST107-2221-E182-051