Interactive mining of neural pathways to preoperative neurosurgical planning.

Background And Objective: Preoperative understanding of white matter anatomy, including its spatial relationship with pathology and superficial landmarks, is vital for effective surgical planning. The ability to interactively synthesize neural pathways from diffusion data and dynamically discern neuroanatomy-referenced fiber patterns enables neurosurgeons to construct detailed mental models of the patient's brain and assess surgical risks. We present a novel interactive software designed for real-time mining of neural pathways from diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI) data.