VISE Fall Seminar – Sarah Frisken, PhD 10.12.23
VISE Fall Seminar to be led by
Sarah Frisken, PhD
Associate Professor, Harvard Medical School
and Lead Investigator in Radiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH)
Date: Thursday, October 12, 2023
Time: 11:45 a.m. Lunch, 12:00 p.m. start
Location: Stevenson 5326
Title:
Improving precision in image-guided neurosurgery
Abstract:
Precision is particularly important in brain surgery where errors can lead to serious complications and even death. Neuornavigation systems, which display the location of surgical instruments in preoperative 3D imaging, can be used as a sort of ‘GPS for the brain’ to guide neurosurgeons during surgery. However, preoperative imaging become less a reliable representation of the brain as surgery progresses due to tissue retraction, tumor resection and deformation known as ‘brain shift’. In this presentation, I will discuss several of our research projects, including a low-cost open-source navigation system to make this technology accessible in low-and-middle-income countries, fast deformable image registration to compensate for brain shift, continuous tracking of surgical instruments to estimate the resection cavity, and a new 4D cranial ultrasound probe to provide continuous intraoperative imaging.
Short Bio:
Dr. Frisken is a computer scientist who has been active in research for more than 30 years. She is currently an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School and Lead Investigator in Radiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH). At BWH, she works with computer scientists, engineers, surgeons, and other clinicians to improve precision in image-guided neurosurgery. With a background in computer graphics and medical image processing, she enjoys working at the interface between theory and practice. She spent more than a decade working in an industrial research lab on new ways to represent and manipulate digital shape. That work led to innovations in digital sculpting, a font rendering system used ubiquitously in modern cell phones and other devices, and a commercial system for simulating computer aided machining with unprecedented precision. Since then, she has been a Full Professor in Computer Science at Tufts University, a contractor at Disney Research, and founder and CEO of a small startup company. After selling her startup, Dr. Frisken joined the Radiology department at BWH to apply her expertise in research, innovation, and product development to translate advanced research to clinical practice.