Not without the students. A history of image-guided surgery in the NIST lab in the Montreal Neurological Institute - CHU Rennes - Amphithéâtre Du Bloc Centre Cardio Pulmonaire

This talk will track the history of image guided surgery in the NeuroImaging and Surgical Technology (NIST) lab at the Montreal Neurological Institute. This talk will focus on the joy of working with curious, bright and hardworking students. The NIST lab was the first to use frameless stereotaxic techniques with tracked intra-operative ultrasound to improve guidance during surgery while accounting for brain shift. The procedure matches intra-operative ultrasound to the pre-operative MRI data using image intensities or blood vessels as features to drive the registration. The result of this mapping is a deformation field that can be used to warp the pre-operative data to fit the anatomy of the patient during surgery, thus correcting for brain shift. Over the past two decades, though the work of many students and fellows, this matching procedure has been improved by using additional anatomical landmarks, using simulated ultrasound, using statistically-driven intensity-based similarity functions and implemented with a fast GPU implementations. In addition to the brain, the NIST lab has developed tools to register preoperative spine CT to the patient, again with intra-operative ultrasound, to help in pedicle screw insertion when instrumenting one or more vertebrae. All these tools have been made publicly available as open source neuronavigation software known as IBIS (at [http://nist.mni.mcgill.ca/atlases/](http://nist.mni.mcgill.ca/atlases/)).