Assessing the Feasibility of Ultrasound-Initialized Deformable Bone Models

摘要

This paper presents a feasibility and evaluation study for using 2D ultrasound in conjunction with our statistical deformable bone model in the scope of computer-assisted surgery (CAS). The final aim is to provide the surgeon with an enhanced 3D visualization for surgical navigation in orthopaedic surgery without the need for pre-operative CT or MRI scans. We unified our earlier work to combine several automatic methods for statistical bone shape prediction from a sparse set of surface points, and ultrasound segmentation and calibration to provide the intended rapid and accurate visualization. We compared the use of a tracked digitizing pointer to ultrasound to acquire landmarks and bone surface points for the estimation of two cast proximal femurs, where two users performed the experiments 5-6 times per scenario. The concept of CT-based error introduced in the paper is used to give an approximate quantitative value to the best hoped-for prediction error, or lower-bound error, for a given anatomy. The conclusions of this work were that the pointer-based approach produced good results, and although the ultrasound-based approach performed considerably worse on average, there were several cases where the results were comparable to the pointer-based approach. It was determined that the primary factor for poor ultrasound performance was the inaccurate localization of the three initial landmarks, which are used for the statistical shape model.