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 preoperative 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.

Date Published: 13 March 2006
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 6141, Medical Imaging 2006: Visualization, Image-Guided Procedures, and Display, 61410R (13 March 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.649529

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6141:
Medical Imaging 2006: Visualization, Image-Guided Procedures, and Display
Kevin R. Cleary; Robert L. Galloway, Jr., Editor(s)