Virtual 3D Bone Fracture Reconstruction via Inter-Fragmentary Surface Alignment

Abstract

This paper presents a system for virtual reconstruction of comminuted bone fractures. The system takes as input a collection of bone fragment models represented as surface meshes, typically segmented from CT data. Users interact with fragment models in a virtual environment to reconstruct the fracture. In contrast to other approaches that are either completely automatic or completely interactive, the system attempts to strike a balance between interaction and automation. There are two key fracture reconstruction interactions: (1) specifying matching surface regions between fragment pairs and (2) initiating pairwise and global fragment alignment optimizations. Each match includes two fragment surface patches hypothesized to correspond in the reconstruction. Each alignment optimization initialized by the user triggers a 3D surface registration which takes as input: (1) the specified matches and (2) the current position of the fragments. The proposed system leverages domain knowledge via user interaction, and incorporates recent advancements in surface registration, to generate fragment reconstructions that are more accurate than manual methods and more reliable than completely automatic methods.