Towards automatic path planning for multi-port minimally-traumatic lateral skull base surgery

We investigate a multi-port minimally-traumatic approach for lateral skull base surgery. Our long-term goal is to automatically determine the best combination of three paths from the skull surface to the surgical target. Since this multi-port approach is not yet in clinical use, it is difficult to define what the best combination of paths is. Therefore, we present a planning tool which allows to manually selecting a combination of three paths. A clinician used this planning tool to select the best combination of three paths for three target structures in computed tomography data sets of 20 patients. From this choice we derived initial constraints for an automatic planning of the best combination of paths.