Surgery planning tools for the osseous grafting treatment.

This paper presents a method for computer assisted selection of optimal donor sites for autologous grafts in the craniofacial surgery planning. The method consists of two stages. The non-automatic graft design step is followed by a fully automatic procedure to find the best harvesting site in the predefined donor region. The main idea of the proposed method is based on the registration paradigm. The optimal donor site is identified by performing an optimization of the surface based similarity measure between the donor region and the designed graft template. An efficient optimization method based on the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm has been implemented. It enables, once the preprocessing step has been performed, selection of the optimal donor site in time less than one minute.