Mixed Reality Visualization and Interactive Hemodynamic Computation of the Human Brain

We develop a mixed reality platform to visualize some of the anatomical structures and functional areas of the human brain and interactively compute the blood flows in the cerebral artery with a special focus on the impact of aneurysms. The geometrical details and the cerebral artery are segmented from MRI images, and the functional areas of the brain are identified and mapped by a functional brain atlas. The platform consists of a holographic device with camera to capture the physical object and also hand gestures from the user to operate on the digital object, and a GPU-based platform manager to fuse the data from the holographic device and the computing system. Another major component of the platform is a parallel computer connected to the platform manager for the near real time computation of the hemodynamics of the cerebral flows using a highly scalable domain decomposition algorithm. Such a platform has potentially many applications in brain sciences, and in this paper, we focus on its application in the visualization of the digital brain including the area, volume and thickness of certain functional areas, the risk assessment of rupture and the surgical planning for cerebral aneurysms.