Patent ID: 9741114
Date: 2017-08-22
CPC Classifications: A61B,G06F,G06T,G16H

Claim:
1. A medical system, comprising: a medical imaging device for generating medical image data utilized for generating a nerve-indicating dataset comprising information about a brain of a patient suitable for identifying neural fibres in the brain of the patient; at least one computer operably coupled to the medical imaging device and having at least one processor and memory with instructions, the instructions, when executed on the computer, configuring the computer to determine a weight of a trajectory between a starting point and a target within the brain of the patient using a vulnerability field of the brain, by: acquiring, at the at least one processor, the medical image data and determining, by the at least one processor and based on the medical image data, the nerve-indicating dataset; determining, by the at least one processor, a plurality of nodes within the brain; determining, by the at least one processor, axonal linkage of the nodes based on the nerve-indicating dataset to obtain edges connecting the nodes, the nodes and edges constituting a connectivity graph; determining, by the at least one processor, a weight for each of the edges depending on a statistical measure of the respective edge in the connectivity graph; determining, by the at least one processor and for each of the edges, which of a plurality of voxels in a dataset of the brain of the patient belong to the edges or are passed by the edges and assigning, by the at least one processor, or adding, by the at least one processor, the determined weight of the respective edges to all of the voxels belonging to the respective edge to obtain a weighted voxel-based dataset of the brain of the patient defining the vulnerability field of the brain; acquiring, at the at least one processor, a number of potential starting points of at least one trajectory between each of the starting points and a target in the brain; determining, by the at least one processor, and for each of the starting points, the at least one trajectory connecting the respective starting point with the target, the at least one trajectory passing through a number of respective adjacent voxels of the weighted voxel-based dataset; adding, by the at least one processor, the weights of all voxels being passed by the respective trajectory to obtain a respective weighted trajectory.