Virtual Reassembly of Fractured Bones for Orthopedic Surgery

In orthopedic surgery, the traditional restoration of comminuted fracture basically relies on surgeon's manual work, which is usually intricate and error-prone. If fractured bones are poorly reassembled, the patient may suffer from more exposure to radiation and longer recovery time. More severely, some operation mistakes can cause sequela, such as joint dysfunction and infection. Therefore, orthopedic surgeons urgently need an intelligent assistance solution to improve the accuracy and reliability of fractured bones reassembly in procedure. This paper presents an automatic pipeline for virtual reassembly of fractured bones which are broken into pieces. It uses an intact bone as a template. We first reconstruct the 3D fractured bone from CT data using MIMICS. Then we analyze the shape structure of bone model through extracting key feature points and comparing descriptors. Finally, we search the correspondence between the fragments and template. The aligning is performed to ensure the fragments can join together. Compared with some semi-automatic reassembly methods for archaeological artifacts and forensic evidences, ours is fully automatic without human interactions and specialized to medical purposes. It can help orthopedic surgeons to make correct decisions in fractured bones reassembly.