Diffusion Tensor Imaging Tractography of the Facial Nerve for the Pre-Surgical Plan in Patients with Vestibular Schwannoma

Patients with vestibular schwannoma (VS) may experience facial nerve (FN) damage after surgery. The aim of this thesis is to evaluate the feasibility to use DTI fiber tracking for the preoperative determination of FN course in patients with VS and to optimize the DTI sequence to decrease the acquisition time. The results show that the probabilistic iFOD2 algorithm, applied to multi-shell DTI protocol, is the most suitable for FN reconstruction in all the five patients analyzed.