Anatomically constrained deformation for design of cranial implant: methodology and validation

We present a new approach for cranial implant design which uses anatomical constrained deformation based on reference models. The methodological framework contains three steps: patient-specific generation of the reference model containing the anatomical constraints about the skull shape; determination of the spatial correspondence between the patient skull and the reference model by 3D matching; adaptive deformation of the fragment on the reference model corresponding to the defect area on the patient skull for implant design. The proposed method was validated by simulating the reconstruction of artificially generated defects on healthy skulls. The validation results show that this approach can generate implant geometry very fast and with satisfactory quality. This approach also outperforms the surface interpolation method in reconstructing cranial defects.