Back

OptiLITT: A Computer-Assisted Planning System for Dual-Fiber Laser Interstitial Thermal Therapy using Cylindrical Ablation Optimization

Yeung, N.; Mishra, A.; Mehta, A.

2026-07-06 surgery
10.64898/2026.07.03.26356873 medRxiv
Show abstract

Laser Interstitial Thermal Therapy (LITT) is a minimally invasive neurosurgical technique in which a stereotactically-implanted fiber delivers thermal energy to ablate intracranial lesions. Existing computer-assisted planning systems optimize trajectories against a one-dimensional line abstraction, then approximate the ablation zone as a fixed-radius cylinder post-hoc to estimate coverage. Trajectories selected as optimal under this model are not guaranteed to remain optimal once the cylindrical extent is applied, which introduces a mismatch between predicted and true ablation coverage. This may also underestimate spillover into surrounding healthy tissue. We present OptiLITT, a treatment planning system that represents the laser probe as a cylindrical ablation volume from the onset of optimization, jointly solving dual-fiber placement, lesion coverage, and healthy-tissue spillover as a single coupled problem. All planning parameters are exposed through a user-configurable graphical user interface supporting intraoperative refinement between planning stages.

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.