Assessment of Electrode Displacement and Deformation with Respect to Pre-Operative Planning in Deep Brain Stimulation

The post-operative validation of deep brain stimulation electrode displacement and deformation is an important task towards improved DBS targeting. In this paper a method is proposed to align models of deep brain stimulation electrodes that are automatically extracted from post-operative CT imaging in a common coordinate system utilizing the planning data as reference. This enables the assessment of electrode displacement and deformation over the whole length of the trajectory with respect to the pre-operative planning. Accordingly, it enables the estimation of plan deviations in the surgical process as well as cross-patient statistics on electrode deformation, e.g. the bending induced by brain-shift.