Towards a software tool for ultrasound guided robotic hip resurfacing surgery

ABSTRACT

This paper presents the integration between the Image Guided Surgery Toolkit (IGSTK) and the Point Cloud Library (PCL) to deliver a software tool (SWT) to robotic orthopedic surgery. The application that demonstrates the usefulness of the tool was developed for the registration of 2D ultrasound (US) images of the femur to 3D point clouds obtained from CT or US images, i.e., the 3D bone model. The surgery tackled is Hip Resurfacing of the femur, which needs a precise knowledge of the bone precision and orientation. The SWT developed takes advantage of the well known characteristics of IGSTK and the libraries from which it depends, e.g., OpenCV, ITK, VTK, etc, and the capabilities of the PCL library for point cloud processing and integration to OROCOS/ROS, the Open Robot Control Software Project. For the registration, during surgery, the SWT acquires a bone surface from a sequence of US images, in the 3D space. This bone surface will then be registered to the pre-operative bone model, for a precise knowledge of the bone position and orientation, allowing to automatise the procedure through a robotic manipulator.

References

1. J. R., Resubal, D. A. Morgan, "Computer-Assisted vs Conventional Mechanical Jig Technique in Hip Resurfacing Arthroplasty", The Journal of Arthroplasty, 24(3), pp.341--250, 2009.
2. J. Sanches, J. Nascimento and J. Marques, Medical image noise reduction using the Sylvester-Lyapunov equation, IEEE transactions on image processing, 17 (9), pp. 1522--1539, 2008.
3. P. J. S. Gonçalves, A. M. D. Gonçalves. Visual Tracking of Surgical Instruments, application to Laparoscopy. In Proc. of 6th International Conference on Technology and Medical Sciences, Porto, Portugal, October 2010.
4. P. M. B. Torres and P. J. S. Gonçalves and J. M. M. Martins. Bone Registration using a Robotic Ultrasound Probe. In Proceedings of VIPIMAGE 2011, 3rd ECCOMAS Thematic Conference on Computational Vision and Medical Image Processing, Pages 79--83, Algarve, Portugal, October 2011
5. B Brendel, S Winter, A Rick, M Stockheim, H Ermert, Bone registration with 3D CT and ultrasound data sets, International Congress Series, Volume 1256, Pages 426--432, June 2003.

Index Terms

• Computer systems organization

  • Embedded and cyber-physical systems

    • Robotics

      • Robotic components

• Computing methodologies

  • Artificial intelligence

    • Computer vision

      • Computer vision problems

        • Interest point and salient region detections

        • Reconstruction

  • Computer graphics

    • Image manipulation

• Mathematics of computing

  • Mathematical analysis

    • Numerical analysis

      • Computation of transforms