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Published on: November 23, 2019
Point Cloud Registration for Measuring Shape Dependence of Soft Tissue Deformation by Digital Twins in Head and Neck
Sara Monji-Azad1, David Männle2, Jürgen Hesser1,3,4,5,6
1Mannheim Institute for Intelligent Systems in Medicine (MIISM), Medical Faculty Mannheim, Heidelberg University, Mannheim, Germany.
Introduction:
A 2½ D point cloud registration method was developed to generate digital twins of different tissue shapes and resection cavities by applying a machine learning (ML) approach. This demonstrates the feasibility of quantifying soft tissue shifts.
Methods:
An ML model was trained using simulated surface scan data obtained from tumor resections in a pig head cadaver model. It hereby uses 438 2½ D scans of the tissue surface. Tissue shift was induced by a temperature change from 7.91 ± 4.1°C to 36.37 ± 1.28°C.
Results:
Digital twins were generated from various branched and compact resection cavities (RCs) and cut tissues (CT). A temperature increase induced a tissue shift with a significant volume increase of 6 mL and 2 mL in branched and compact RCs, respectively (p = 0.0443; 0.0157). The volumes of branched and compact CT were decreased by 3 and 4 mL (p < 0.001). In the warm state, RC and CT no longer fit together because of the significant tissue deformation. Although not significant, the compact RC showed a greater tissue deformation of 1 μL than the branched RC with 0.5 μL induced by the temperature change (p = 0.7874). The branched and compact CT forms responded almost equally to changes in temperature (p = 0.1461).
Conclusions:
The simulation experiment of induced soft tissue deformation using digital twins based on 2½ D point cloud models proved that our method helps to quantify shape-dependent tissue shifts.
