A Method for Visualization of Brain Neural Pathway Using Critical Points and Target Regions

Abstract

Visualization of a brain neural pathway is a useful tool for supporting surgical planning. In this paper, we propose a method for visualizing a brain neural pathway by using both critical points and target regions in order to extract necessary pathways. Here, critical points are those points at which the magnitude of the vector vanishes, and we assume that a neural pathway consists of a set of streamlines in a vortical flow field and we find the start points of streamlines by classifying critical points. The user also specifies target regions, such as regions of interest, and visualizes the important streamlines that pass through the target regions.