Improving Convenience and Reliability of 5-ALA-Induced Fluorescent Imaging for Brain Tumor Surgery
説明
This paper presents two features to make neurosurgery with 5-ALA-induced fluorescent imaging more convenient and more reliable. The first one is the concept for a system that switches between white light and excitation light rapidly and allows surgeons to easily locate the tumor region on the normal color image. The second one is the way for color signal processing that yields a stable fluorescent signal without depending on the lighting condition. We developed a prototype system and confirmed that the color image display with the fluorescent region worked well for both the brain of a dead swine and the resected tumor of a human brain. We also performed an experiment with physical phantoms of fluorescent objects and confirmed that the calculated flurophore density-related values were stably obtained for several lighting conditions.