Seminar: Optimizing Cranial Vault Remodeling

Seminar by Ricardo Fukasawa

Associate Professor

Department of Combinatorics and Optimization

University of Waterloo

Craniosynostosis, a condition affecting 1 in 2000 infants, is caused by premature fusing of cranial vault sutures, and manifests itself in abnormal skull growth patterns. Left untreated, the condition may lead to severe developmental impairment. Standard practice is to apply corrective cranial vault remodeling surgery in the first year of the infants life. The current standard practice is for the procedure to be done in an ad-hoc fashion, with the decisions of how to perform the surgery left to be done completely based on the surgeon’s experience and intuition.

In this work we study how optimization can be used to help in the surgery planning, particularly in providing a tool that would suggest to a surgeon where and how to best obtain a good outcome. The ultimate goal of this project is to design a complete end-to-end toolkit that can be used for surgeons to obtain a more formal way to plan their surgeries.

I will discuss some of the ongoing work that has been developed by a team from Waterloo in partnership with the SickKids hospital in Toronto.

Prof. Fukasawa is an Associate Professor in the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo. He finished his PhD in Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization at Georgia Tech in 2008. After that he held the IBM Herman Goldstine postdoctoral fellowship for 1 year and subsequently joined the University of Waterloo as an Assistant Professor. His main research interests are in mixed-integer programing, operations research, stochastic programming and vehicle routing.