Motion correction of thermographic images in neurosurgery

Abstract

Neurosurgery relies strongly on medical imaging techniques. However, many state-of-the-art diagnostic tools such as computer tomography (CT) and magneto-resonance imaging (MRI) cannot be applied during ongoing surgery in general. Our aim is to realize a multi-purpose imaging platform capable of real-time assistance to the surgeon. Therefore, we apply thermography: a non-invasive, contactless, marker-free technique that has been used in various medical applications, albeit some challenges remain. In this paper, we propose a Cellular Nonlinear Network-based image pre-processing for feature enhancing and extraction followed by a cepstrum-based motion correction algorithm allowing a real-time removal of breathing artifacts from thermographic images.