The main goal of brain cancer surgery is to perform an accurate resection of the tumor, preserving as much normal brain tissue as possible for the patient. The development of a non-contact and label-free method to provide reliable support for tumor resection in real-time during neurosurgical procedures is a current clinical need. Hyperspectral imaging is a non-contact, non-ionizing, and label-free imaging modality that can assist surgeons during this challenging task without using any contrast agent. In this work, we present a deep learning-based framework for processing hyperspectral images of in vivo human brain tissue. The proposed framework was evaluated by our human image database, which includes 26 in vivo hyperspectral cubes from 16 different patients, among which 258,810 pixels were labeled. The proposed framework is able to generate a thematic map where the parenchymal area of the brain is delineated and the location of the tumor is identified, providing guidance to the operating surgeon for a successful and precise tumor resection. The deep learning pipeline achieves an overall accuracy of 80% for multiclass classification, improving the results obtained with traditional support vector machine (SVM)-based approaches. In addition, an aid visualization system is presented, where the final thematic map can be adjusted by the operating surgeon to find the optimal classification threshold for the current situation during the surgical procedure.
Keywords: bioinformatics; brain tumor; cancer surgery; deep learning; hyperspectral imaging; image-guided surgery; intraoperative imaging; precision medicine.