MRI and CT Fusion in Stereotactic Electroencephalography: A Literature Review

Epilepsy is a common neurological disease characterized by spontaneous recurrent seizures. Resection of the epileptogenic tissue may be needed in approximately 25% of all cases due to ineffective treatment with anti-epileptic drugs. The surgical intervention depends on the correct detection of epileptogenic zones. The detection relies on invasive diagnostic techniques such as Stereotactic Electroencephalography (SEEG), which uses multi-modal fusion to aid localizing electrodes, using pre-surgical magnetic resonance and intra-surgical computer tomography as the input images. Moreover, it is essential to know how to measure the performance of fusion methods in the presence of external objects, such as electrodes. In this paper, a literature review is presented, applying the methodology proposed by Kitchenham to determine the main techniques of multi-modal brain image fusion, the most relevant performance metrics, and the main fusion tools. The search was conducted using the databases and search engines of Scopus, IEEE, PubMed, Springer, and Google Scholar, resulting in 15 primary source articles. The literature review found that rigid registration was the most used technique when electrode localization in SEEG is required, which was the proposed method in nine of the found articles. However, there is a lack of standard validation metrics, which makes the performance measurement difficult when external objects are presented, caused primarily by the absence of a gold-standard dataset for comparison.