Picturing surgical decision making
Project PICTURE aims to ‘map’ treatment decisions for the first time by merging routine brain MRIs with results of surgery and radiotherapy for thousands of patients in a 3D-visualisation.
These brain maps describe the tumor location for different patient groups and their associated surgery and radiotherapy outcomes. Resulting brain maps are gathered into the PICTURE tool. Within the tool it’s possible to filter existing maps to make them more applicable for a certain population. Additionally, it’s possible to upload MRI scans of a new patient and compare these scans to the existing data by extracting tumor features and making predictions of the expected (surgical) outcome.
The research project
Patients with a primary brain tumor receive a combination of surgery, radiotherapy, and chemotherapy.
However, tumors invariably recur and survival is limited. Surgery and radiotherapy are image-guided therapies, therefore the accuracy depends mostly on the decision where to treat than on the technical execution.
A standard for quality assessment of treatment decisions in clinical neurosurgery and radiotherapy is lacking because brain location is a complicating factor – some brain regions perform more essential tasks than others.
QUALITY ASSESMENT
The new approach of probability maps combined with deep learning serves as quality assessment of yesterday’s therapy to guide tomorrow’s treatment. The technique will provide a detailed quality assessment of therapeutic methods and results between care teams. Through the maps it’s possible to discover new patterns of disease in relation to patient outcomes, such as survival and functioning.
These brain maps will demonstrate the brain locations of the tumor, resected tissue and radiotherapy plans for patient groups. In addition, these brain maps will be used to discover tumor growth patterns and identify recurance locations.
IMPROVED DECISION MAKING
We expect that multidisciplinary decision making will improve from this standardization of quality assessment and through unlocking knowledge of international expert teams.
Our latest updates
Two new PICTURE papers on automatic segmentation of gliomas
Two new PICTURE papers on automatic segmentation of gliomas
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