Computer-based Planning of Optimal Donor Sites for Autologous Osseous Grafts

摘要

Bone graft surgery is often necessary for reconstruction of craniofacial defects after trauma, tumor, infection or congenital malformation. In this operative technique the removed or missing bone segment is filled with a bone graft. The mainstay of the craniofacial reconstruction rests with the replacement of the defected bone by autogeneous bone grafts. To achieve sufficient incorporation of the autograft into the host bone, precise planning and simulation of the surgical intervention is required. The major problem is to determine as accurately as possible the donor site where the graft should be dissected from and to define the shape of the desired transplant. A computer-aided method for semi-automatic selection of optimal donor sites for autografts in craniofacial reconstructive surgery has been developed. The non-automatic step of graft design and constraint setting is followed by a fully automatic procedure to find the best fitting position. In extension to preceding work, a new optimization approach based on the Levenberg-Marquardt method has been implemented and embedded into our computer-based surgical planning system. This new technique enables, once the pre-processing step has been performed, selection of the optimal donor site in time less than one minute. The method has been applied during surgery planning step in more than 20 cases. The postoperative observations have shown that functional results, such as speech and chewing ability as well as restoration of bony continuity were clearly better compared to conventionally planned operations. Moreover, in most cases the duration of the surgical interventions has been distinctly reduced.