Benchmarking NousNav: quantifying the spatial accuracy and clinical performance of an affordable, open-source...

Area of Science:

• Neurosurgery
• Medical Device Technology
• Biomedical Engineering

Background:

• Advanced neurosurgical technologies are often inaccessible in low-resource settings due to high costs.
• Open-source platforms offer a potential solution to bridge this accessibility gap.
• NousNav is a novel, low-cost, open-source neuronavigation platform designed for resource-limited environments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the spatial accuracy of the NousNav neuronavigation system.
• To compare the performance of NousNav's core technologies against a commercial gold standard.
• To assess the feasibility of using consumer-grade optical tracking for neurosurgical navigation.

Main Methods:

• Conducted experiments to evaluate hardware and registration infrastructure of NousNav.
• Tested system components in both simulated bench-top environments and clinical settings.
• Performed evaluations across four brain tumor resection cases.

Main Results:

• The Optitrack Duo tracker exhibited a mean localization error of 0.8mm (SD 0.4mm).
• Bench-top phantom testing showed an average target registration error of 5.0mm (SD 2.3mm) for NousNav.
• Clinical evaluations reported a mean distance of 4.2mm (SD 1.5mm) compared to a commercial system.

Conclusions:

• Baseline camera tracking, instrument calibration, and patient positioning significantly impact NousNav's spatial performance.
• NousNav provides an essential benchmark assessment for future development and clinical applications.
• The system's performance suggests potential for improving neurosurgical access in underserved regions.