Integration of Functional Data (PET) into Brain Surgery Planning and Neuronavigation

There are distinct advantages of including functional data from PET into surgery planning and neuronavigation: tumor delineation and localization of functional areas. Preoperative intervention planning in brain tumours poses many additional challenges if the goal is to include functional data from PET for neuronavigation: co-registration of multimodal image data (MRI and PET) is conceptually the most demanding task. However, we find that associated problems of visualization, data transfer, documentation and, in general terms, quality assurance are often underestimated. We address some of these problems, including visual inspection of co-registration accuracy, preparation of image data, DICOM capabilities and “electronic documentation” [1].