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Recent advancements in imaging technologies (MRI, PET, CT, among others) have significantly improved clinical localisation of lesions of the central nervous system (CNS) before surgery, making possible for neurosurgeons to plan and navigate away from functional brain locations when removing tumours, such as gliomas. However, neuronavigation in the surgical management of brain tumours remains a significant challenge, due to the inability to maintain accurate spatial information of pathological and healthy locations intraoperatively. To answer this challenge, the HyperProbe consortium have been put together, consisting of a team of engineers, physicists, data scientists and neurosurgeons, to develop an innovative, all-optical, intraoperative imaging system based on (i) hyperspectral imaging (HSI) for rapid, multiwavelength spectral acquisition, and (ii) artificial intelligence (AI) for image reconstruction, morpho-chemical characterisation and molecular fingerprint recognition. Our HyperProbe system will (1) map, monitor and quantify biomolecules of interest in cerebral physiology; (2) be handheld, cost-effective and user-friendly; (3) apply AI-based methods for the reconstruction of the hyperspectral images, the analysis of the spatio-spectral data and the development and quantification of novel biomarkers for identification of glioma and differentiation from functional brain tissue. HyperProbe will be validated and optimised with studies in optical phantoms, in vivo against gold standard modalities in neuronavigational imaging, and finally we will provide proof of principle of its performances during routine brain tumour surgery on patients. HyperProbe aims at providing functional and structural information on biomarkers of interest that is currently missing during neuro-oncological interventions.
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