Viewpoint Selection for Fibrous Structures in a Pre-operative Context: Application to Cranial Nerves Surrounding Skull Base Tumors

In this work, we present a viewpoint selection method specifically designed for fibrous structures in a pre-operative context. A view quality metric based on entropy was developed, which integrates the typical requirements of surgery planning. We applied our approach in the case of cranial nerves surrounding skull base tumors. The relevance of the viewpoints selected by our method was assessed qualitatively by a neurosurgeon and quantitatively based on statistical tests. These viewpoints were proven to have a high informative content, and therefore to enable a good understanding and mental representation the 3D anatomical scene in a pre-operative context.