Image-guided neurosurgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital

In this article, we report efforts to integrate a number of state-of-the-art technologies for MRI-guided neurosurgery at the Brigham and Women's Hospital (BWH) in Boston. These include advanced intraoperative imaging, image registration, visualization, navigation, minimally invasive ablative therapies, and robotics. This is part of a multidisciplinary Image-Guided Therapy Program that comprises several key research thrusts, including the surgical planning laboratory, magnetic resonance therapy (MRT), focused ultrasound surgery, thermal ablation, and neurosurgery

Background

In 2004, approximately 10,620 (57%) males and 7,880 (43%) females in the United States developed cancer in the brain and other regions of the central nervous system. New brain-tumor-related deaths in this country have reached approximately 12,760 per year (see http://www.cancer.org). The average survival time for patients with low-grade gliomas is about 7.5 years from diagnosis, while most patients harboring malignant gliomas have a life expectancy of about one year after diagnosis (http://www.cancer.org).