Patent ID: 7167760

Claim:
A method for optical placement of a deep brain stimulator in a targated region of a brain of a living subject, comprising the steps of nonmanually selecting an initial optimal position from which a final position for optimal placement of a deep brain stimulator in the targrted region is determinated, wherein the step of nonmanually selecting the initial optimal position comprises the steps of: a. choosing an image volume as a common volume of reference from a set of image volumes, the set of image volumes having N image volumes each being acquired pre-operatively from a brain of a living subject having a deep brain stimulator placed in a target, N being an integer greater than 2; b. registering each of the remaining N−1 image volumes to the chosen common volume of reference by a nonrigid registration algorithm so as to create an atlas; c. mapping spatial coordinates of the deep brain stimulator in each of the remaining N−1 image volumes onto atlas coordinates in the atlas by a transformation that registers the corresponding image volume to the atlas; d. computing a centroid of all the mapped atlas coordinates as an optimal target position of the deep brain stimulator in the atlas; and e. projecting the optimal target position of the deep brain stimulator in the atlas onto the pre-operatively acquired image volume by an inverse of the transformation that registers the pre-operatively acquired image volume to the atlas so as to identify the initial optimal position of the deep brain stimulator in the targeted region of the brain of the living subject.