Interactive computation and visualization of deep brain stimulation effects using Duality

Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is an established treatment for movement disorders such as Parkinson's disease or essential tremor. Currently, the selection of optimal stimulation settings is performed by iteratively adjusting the stimulation parameters and is a time consuming procedure that requires multiple clinic visits of several hours. Recently, computational models to predict and visualize the effect of DBS have been developed with the goal to simplify and accelerate this procedure by providing visual guidance and such models have been made available also on mobile devices. However, currently available visualization software still either lacks mobility, i.e., it is running on desktop computers and not easily available in clinical praxis, or flexibility, as the simulations that are visualized on mobile devices have to be precomputed. The goal of the pipeline presented in this paper is to close this gap: Using Duality, a newly developed software for the interactive visualization of simulation results, we implemented a pipeline that allows to compute DBS simulations in near-real time and instantaneously visualize the result on a tablet computer. Therefore, a client-server setup is used, so that the visualization and user interaction occur on the tablet computer, while the computations are carried out on a remote server. We present two examples for the use of Duality, one for postoperative programming and one for the planning of DBS surgery in a pre- or intraoperative setting. We carry out a performance analysis and present the results of a case study in which the pipeline for postoperative programming was applied.