A comparison study assessing the feasibility of ultrasound-initialized deformable bone models

This article presents a feasibility and evaluation study for using 2D ultrasound in conjunction with our statistical deformable bone model within the scope of computer-assisted surgery. The final aim is to provide the surgeon with enhanced 3D visualization for surgical navigation in orthopedic surgery without the need for preoperative CT or MRI scans. We unified our earlier work to combine several automatic methods for statistical bone shape prediction and ultrasound segmentation and calibration to provide the intended rapid and accurate visualization. We compared the use of a tracked digitizing pointer and ultrasound for acquiring landmarks and bone surface points for the estimation of two cast proximal femurs.