Registration of 3D freehand ultrasound to a bone model for orthopedic procedures of the forearm

Abstract

Purpose

For guidance of orthopedic surgery, the registration of preoperative images and corresponding surgical plans with the surgical setting can be of great value. Ultrasound (US) is an ideal modality for surgical guidance, as it is non-ionizing, real time, easy to use, and requires minimal (magnetic/radiation) safety limitations. By extracting bone surfaces from 3D freehand US and registering these to preoperative bone models, complementary information from these modalities can be fused and presented in the surgical realm.

Methods

A partial bone surface is extracted from US using phase symmetry and a factor graph-based approach. This is registered to the detailed 3D bone model, conventionally generated for preoperative planning, based on a proposed multi-initialization and surface-based scheme robust to partial surfaces.

Results

36 forearm US volumes acquired using a tracked US probe were independently registered to a 3D model of the radius, manually extracted from MRI. Given intraoperative time restrictions, a computationally efficient algorithm was determined based on a comparison of different approaches. For all 36 registrations, a mean (± SD) point-to-point surface distance of \(0.57\,(\pm \,0.08)\,\hbox {mm}\) was obtained from manual gold standard US bone annotations (not used during the registration) to the 3D bone model.

Conclusions

A registration framework based on the bone surface extraction from 3D freehand US and a subsequent fast, automatic surface alignment robust to single-sided view and large false-positive rates from US was shown to achieve registration accuracy feasible for practical orthopedic scenarios and a qualitative outcome indicating good visual image alignment.