Brain cancer surgery has the goal of performing an accurate resection of the tumor and preserving as much as possible the quality of life of the patient. There is a clinical need to develop non-invasive techniques that can provide reliable assistance for tumor resection in real-time during surgical procedures. Hyperspectral imaging (HSI) arises as a new, noninvasive and non-ionizing technique that can assist neurosurgeons during this difficult task. In this paper, we explore the use of deep learning (DL) techniques for processing hyperspectral (HS) images of in-vivo human brain tissue. We developed a surgical aid visualization system capable of offering guidance to the operating surgeon to achieve a successful and accurate tumor resection. The employed HS database is composed of 26 in-vivo hypercubes from 16 different human patients, among which 258,810 labelled pixels were used for evaluation. The proposed DL methods achieve an overall accuracy of 95% and 85% for binary and multiclass classifications, respectively. The proposed visualization system is able to generate a classification map that is formed by the combination of the DL map and an unsupervised clustering via a majority voting algorithm. This map can be adjusted by the operating surgeon to find the suitable configuration for the current situation during the surgical procedure.

Date Published: 8 March 2019
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 10951, Medical Imaging 2019: Image-Guided Procedures, Robotic Interventions, and Modeling, 1095110 (8 March 2019); doi: 10.1117/12.2512569

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 10951:
Medical Imaging 2019: Image-Guided Procedures, Robotic Interventions, and Modeling
Baowei Fei; Cristian A. Linte, Editor(s)