The integration of advanced technologies in healthcare necessitates the development of systems accommodating the daily routines in medical practices. Neurosurgeons, in particular, require extensive practice in microsurgical suturing in the long term, even in the busy routine of a medical practice. This study collaboratively developed a Mixed Reality system with neurosurgeons to support self-training in microscopic suturing. Based on the neurosurgeons’ opinions, we implemented a level-appropriate microsurgical suture training system. For novices, the system offers shadow-matching training to support the practice of precise movements under the high-sensitivity environment of the microscope. For intermediates, it provides a real-time feedback system, which allows users to practice attention to details. Evaluation involved testing the novice system on students with no medical background and the intermediate system on neurosurgery residents. The effectiveness of the system was demonstrated through the experimental results and subsequent discussion.

The exact shape of intracranial aneurysms is critical in medical diagnosis and surgical planning. While voxel-based deep learning frameworks have been proposed for this segmentation task, their performance remains limited. In this study, we offer a two-step surface-based deep learning pipeline that achieves significantly better results. Our proposed model takes a surface model of an entire set of principal brain arteries containing aneurysms as input and returns aneurysm surfaces as output. A user first generates a surface model by manually specifying multiple thresholds for time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography images. The system then samples small surface fragments from the entire set of brain arteries and classifies the surface fragments according to whether aneurysms are present using a point-based deep learning network (PointNet++). Finally, the system applies surface segmentation (SO-Net) to surface fragments containing aneurysms. We conduct a direct comparison of the segmentation performance of our proposed surface-based framework and an existing voxel-based method by counting voxels: our framework achieves a much higher Dice similarity (72%) than the prior approach (46%).

Medicine is an important application area for deep learning models. Research in this field is a combination of medical expertise and data science knowledge. In this paper, instead of 2D medical images, we introduce an open-access 3D intracranial aneurysm dataset, IntrA, that makes the application of points-based and mesh-based classification and segmentation models available. Our dataset can be used to diagnose intracranial aneurysms and to extract the neck for a clipping operation in medicine and other areas of deep learning, such as normal estimation and surface reconstruction. We provide a large-scale benchmark of classification and part segmentation by testing state-of-the-art networks. We also discuss the performance of each method and demonstrate the challenges of our dataset. The published dataset can be accessed here: https://github.com/intra2d2019/IntrA.

We propose a fast, interactive real-time 3DCG deformable simulation prototype for preoperative virtual practice of brain aneurysm clipping surgery, controlled by Position Based Dynamics (PBD). Blood vessels are reconstructed from their central lines, connected to the brain by automatically generated thin threads "virtual trabeculae", and colored by automatically estimated their dominant region.

An interactive method for segmentation and isosurface extraction of medical volume data is proposed. In conventional methods, users decompose a volume into multiple regions iteratively, segment each region using a threshold, and then manually clean the segmentation result by removing clutter in each region. However, this is tedious and requires many mouse operations from different camera views. We propose an alternative approach whereby the user simply applies painting operations to the volume using tools commonly seen in painting systems, such as flood fill and brushes. This significantly reduces the number of mouse and camera control operations. Our technical contribution is in the introduction of the threshold field, which assigns spatially-varying threshold values to individual voxels. This generalizes discrete decomposition of a volume into regions and segmentation using a constant threshold in each region, thereby offering a much more flexible and efficient workflow. This paper describes the details of the user interaction and its implementation. Furthermore, the results of a user study are discussed. The results indicate that the proposed method can be a few times faster than a conventional method.