Method for the evaluation of US perfusion for brain tumor surgery.

This paper presents a method to evaluate intraoperative ultrasound (iUS) perfusion imaging of brain tumors acquired during resection surgeries. It consists in comparing the iUS perfusion with the standard preoperative MR perfusion. In a first step the iUS and MR perfusion data are represented in a common frame with the same pixel size. This is performed using image registration methods to achieve a pixel-wise correspondence between both data sets. In a second step the perfusion data are analyzed and visualized with the SimVis framework. It is possible to select region of interests of the tumor, such as the margins or the center, and to perform a region-based comparison between the iUS and MR perfusion data. The pipeline is demonstrated for one representative surgical case.