Background: The gold standard workflow for targeting structures in the brain involves manual path planning. This preoperative manual path planning is very time-intensive and laborious, especially when some outcome measures such as maximum ablation and penetration depth has to be optimised.
Methods: Our novel path planner generates an optimal path which maximises the hippocampus penetration and distance from critical structures using a precomputed cost map and a reward map.
Results: The average penetration ratio for 12 cases is 88.13 ± 23.23% for a resolution of 1° and a safety margin of 1 mm. Average run time for the path planner based on 1° resolution was 1.99 ± 0.68 min.
Conclusions: Results show that the algorithm can generate safe and clinically relevant paths with a quantitative representation of the penetration depth and is faster than the average reported time for manual path planning.
Keywords: MRI; hippocampus targeting; image guided surgery; neurosurgery; path planning.
© 2022 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.