Motivation¶

Early brain tumor resection can effectively improve the patient’s survival rate. However, resection quality and safety can often be heavily affected by intra-operative brain tissue shift due to factors, such as gravity, drug administration, intracranial pressure change, and tissue removal. Such tissue shift can displace the surgical target and vital structures (e.g., blood vessels) shown in pre-operative images while these displacements may not be directly visible in the surgeon’s field of view.

Intra-operative ultrasound (iUS) is a robust and relatively inexpensive technique to track intra-operative tissue shift and surgical tools, but to help update pre-surgical plans with this information, accurate and robust image registration algorithms are needed to relate pre-surgical MRI to iUS images. Despite the great progress so far, medical image registration techniques still have not made into the surgical room to directly benefit the patients with brain tumors.

This challenge will provide a snapshot of the current progress in the field through extended discussions and provide researchers an opportunity to characterize their image registration methods on newly released standardized datasets of iUS-guided brain tumor resection.

The CuRIOUS 2019 Challenge will offer two different image registration tasks for two different surgical stages after craniotomy: before resection and after resection. 

Taks 1: Register pre-operative MRI to iUS before tumor resection

Taks 2: Register iUS after tumor resection to iUS before tumor resection

More updates will follow shortly, please stay tuned.

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The summary for the 2018 Challenge:

Y. Xiao, Hassan Rivaz, Matthieu Chabanas, M. Fortin, I. Machado, Y. Ou, M.P. Heinrich, J.A. Schnabel, X. Zhong, A. Maier, W. Wein, R. Shams, S. Kadoury, D. Drobny, M. Modat, I. Reinertsen, “Evaluation of MRI to ultrasound registration methods for brain shift correction: The CuRIOUS2018 Challenge,” IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging, Epub, 2019.

Important dates

A new deadline has been set for manuscript submission.

Note that we will continue to accept methodology manuscript until Sep 10, 2019. For the papers received between Aug 5 and Sep 19, the teams will be eligible to receive the testing data  and participate in the final challenge for prizes, but their papers may not be included in the post-conference proceedings for MICCAI satellite events.

Partners

This challenge is co-sponsored by: