Visualization of superficial cerebral lesions using a smartphone application
İhsan Doğan, Ümit Eroğlu, Onur Özgüral, Eyyub S.M. Al-Beyati, Mustafa Cemil Kılınç, Ayhan Cömert, Melih Bozkurt · Turkish Neurosurgery · 2017
A dvances in communication technology have transformed mobile phones into smartphones, which have become nearly indispensable in daily life and can function as portable pocket computers (14).The 'apps', which are applications specific to hand-held computers, including smartphones and tablets, have expanded the functions of mobile technology in social and business activities.In the medical field, many apps developed for use in health care, health education and health science are available for online purchase and downloading (10,13,18).The benefits of these apps include mobile access to medical journals, treatment guidelines, one-touch glossaries, mobile measurement and monitoring of an individual's basic vital signs, guiding physicians in bedside management and assisting in preoperative evaluation of patients.(2,3,7,9,11,12).Apps with specific medical uses have been developed for health care professionals and are available in online stores.However, non-medical apps are also available that can be adapted for use in the health sector (6,8).Such apps, although currently unrelated to specific health sector areas, may expand the use of existing surgical apps in invasive procedures and illustrate basic principles of future mobile surgical programming apps.AIM: Accurate localizations of cerebral lesions ensure good surgical outcomes and minimize intraoperative complications.Currently, microscope-integrated neuronavigation systems compensate these requirements.Since these units are expensive and large, the need to create more practical and portable systems in this "smart" century has become apparent. MATERIAL and METHODS:The See-Through Camera smartphone application (app) is a photography app that penetrates the existing background picture and merges this with a camera image on the smartphone display.This app was applied to neurosurgery for visualization of the projection of the tumors over head in 20 patients.App accuracy was tested according to neuronavigation system.RESULTS: Precision of the app was evaluated according to the superposition ratio of the tumor image drawn by the navigation system with the tumor picture on the smartphone display.This ratio was 40%-100% in 16 (80%) patients and below 40% as an unfavorable result in the rest of the patients.CONCLUSION: Basic rationality of this app can provide the basis of future pocket navigation systems in terms of its design and principles.