Pectus excavatum is the most common congenital deformity of the anterior thoracic wall. The surgical correction of such deformity, using Nuss procedure, consists in the placement of a personalized convex prosthesis into sub-sternal position to correct the deformity. The aim of this work is the CT-scan substitution by ultrasound imaging for the pre-operative diagnosis and pre-modeling of the prosthesis, in order to avoid patient radiation exposure. To accomplish this, ultrasound images are acquired along an axial plane, followed by a rigid registration method to obtain the spatial transformation between subsequent images. These images are overlapped to reconstruct an axial plane equivalent to a CT-slice. A phantom was used to conduct preliminary experiments and the achieved results were compared with the corresponding CT-data, showing that the proposed methodology can be capable to create a valid approximation of the anterior thoracic wall, which can be used to model/bend the prosthesis.

Date Published: 24 February 2012
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 8320, Medical Imaging 2012: Ultrasonic Imaging, Tomography, and Therapy, 83200L (24 February 2012); doi: 10.1117/12.911626

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8320:
Medical Imaging 2012: Ultrasonic Imaging, Tomography, and Therapy
Johan G. Bosch; Marvin M. Doyley, Editor(s)