Computer aided long bone fracture treatment.

Intraoperative fluoroscopy is the tool for intraoperative control of long bone fracture reduction and osteosynthesis. Limitations of this technology include: High radiation exposure to the patient and the surgical team, limited field of view, image distortion, limitation to 2-D representations, and cumbersome updating of verification images. Fluoroscopy based navigation systems partially address these limitations by allowing fluoroscopic images to be used for real-time surgical localization and instrument tracking. In a clinical study on computer guidance by virtual fluoroscopy for distal locking, the capability to provide online guidance with significantly reduced fluoroscopy times is demonstrated. Virtual fluoroscopy applied for guidewire placement in a laboratory setup demonstrated the potential of the method to reduce procedure times, and the potential to increase precision of implant placement with decreased fluoroscopy times. By using virtual reality enhancement, starting from multiple registered fluoroscopy images, a virtual 3-D cylinder model for each principal bone fragment is reconstructed. This spatial cylinder model is not only used to supply a 3-D image of the fracture, but also allows effective fragment projection extraction from the fluoroscopic images and further achieves radiation-free updates of in-situ surgical fluoroscopic images through a non-linear interpolation and warping algorithm. After primary image acquisition, the image intensifier was replaced by the virtual reality system. It was shown that all the steps of the procedure, including fracture reduction and LISS osteosynthesis can be performed completely in virtual reality.