Interactive visualization of fused fMRI and DTI for planning brain tumor resections

The surgical removal of brain tumors can lead to functional impairment. Therefore it is crucial to minimize the damage to important functional areas during surgery. These areas can be mapped before surgery by using functional MRI. However, functional impairment is not only caused by damage to these areas themselves. It is also caused by damage to the fiber bundles that connect these areas with the rest of the brain. Diffusion Tensor Images (DTI) can add information about these connecting fiber bundles. In this paper we present interactive visualization techniques that combine DTI, fMRI and structural MRI to assist the planning of brain tumor surgery. Using a fusion of these datasets, we can extract the fiber bundles that pass through an offset region around the tumor, as can be seen in Figure 1. These bundles can then be explored by filtering on distance to the tumor, or by selecting a specific functional area. This approach enables the surgeon to combine all this information in a highly interactive environment in order to explore the pre-operative situation.