A Curvature-based Method for Identifying the Contact Zone Between Bone Fragments: First Steps

Abstract

The use of computer-assisted procedures before or during surgery provides orthopaedic specialists additional information that help them to reduce surgery time and to improve the understanding of the fracture peculiarities. In this context, the calculation of the fracture area is one of the main tasks in order to better comprehend the fracture. This paper presents the initial results of a method for the calculation of the contact zone between bone fragments by using a curvature-based approach. The method only considers cortical tissue, thus it is robust again the deformation or lack of trabecular tissue because of the fracture. In the case of simple fractures, the contact zone coincides with the entire fracture area. However, the calculation of the contact zone in complex fractures avoids calculating correspondences between fragments; hence the proposed method favours the use of puzzle solving methods in order to address the fracture reduction computation. Our proposal is able to overcome the initial limitations of curvature-based methods such as noise sensitivity, and shows a robust behaviour under circumstances of inexact segmentation or low precision.