Path planning for multi-port lateral skull base surgery based on first clinical experiences

Our research project investigates a multi-port minimally-traumatic approach for lateral skull base surgery, where the surgical target shall be reached through up to three drill canals. For this purpose, an accurate path planning is crucial. In the present work, we propose a semiautomatic path planning approach for multi-port minimally-traumatic lateral skull base surgery. The best path combinations are automatically determined by optimizing the angles and distance buffers of the drill canals. We compare the automatically computed path combinations for 20 data sets to those selected manually by two different clinicians. The experiments prove that we can adequately reproduce the clinicians' choice.