Automatic spinal disease diagnoses assisted by 3D unaligned transverse CT slices

An interactive 3-D application for pain management: Results from a pilot study in spinal cord injury rehabilitation

Research on pain following spinal cord injury (SCI) has revealed that patients not only experience several types of pain that could prove to be challenging to address, but also that each individual can interpret such pain in different subjective ways. In this paper we introduce a 3-D system for facilitating the efficient management of pain, and thus, supporting clinicians in overcoming the aforementioned challenges. This system was evaluated by a cohort of 15 SCI patients in a pilot study that took place between July and October 2010. Participants reported their experiences of using the 3-D system in an adapted version of the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire. Statistically significant results were obtained with regards to the usability and efficiency of the 3-D system, with the majority of the patients finding it particularly useful to report their pain. Our findings suggest that the 3-D system can be an efficient tool in the efforts to better manage the pain experience of SCI patients.

AN AMPUTATION SIMULATOR WITH BONE SAWING HAPTIC INTERACTION

This paper describes a haptic device equipped surgical simulator that provides visual and haptic responses for amputation surgery. This simulator, based on our reported volume (constituted from CT slices) manipulation algorithms, can compute and demonstrate bone changes for the procedures in various orthopedic surgeries. The system is equipped with a haptic device. The position and attitude the haptic device are transformed into the volume to simulate and render the oscillating virtual saw together with the virtual bones. The system then judges if every saw tooth immersing in (cutting) any bone. The load for removing the bone chip on a cutting tooth is calculated according to the feed rate, oscillating speed, saw geometry and bone type. The loads on all the saw teeth are then summed into the three positional forces that the haptic device generates and thus the user feels. The system provides real-time visual and haptic refresh speeds for the sawing procedures. A simulation example of amputation surgery demonstrates the sawing haptic and visual feelings of the sawing procedure are consistent and the simulated sawing force resembles the real force. Therefore, this prototype simulator demonstrates the effectiveness as a surgical simulator to rehearsal the surgical procedures, confirm surgical plains and train interns and students.

Bone drilling haptic interaction for orthopedic surgical simulator

Drilling procedure is widely used in orthopedic surgery to position reduced fractured bones and prosthetic components. However, successful execution of bone drilling requires a high level of dexterity and experience, because the drilling resistance is large and sometimes vibrates violently to difficultly grasp the hand-piece or even break the slender drill. This paper introduces haptic functions that are added to a volume based surgical simulator to simulate the drilling process. These haptic functions compute drilling forces and torques based on reliable metal removing theorem. Therefore, accurate prediction for the drilling process can be obtained to provide effective surgery training and rehearsal. A simulation example of screw and plate surgery for positioning the hip trochanter fracture illustrates the practicality and versatility of the proposed method.

Volume Manipulations for Simulating Bone and Joint Surgery

Bone and joint surgery is widely used in orthopedic, oral, and maxillofacial, and dental and plasty departments to correct bone and joint pathology such as bone and joint tumors and fractures, and skeletal morphological deformities. This article presents a voxel structure to represent topologically and geometrically correct surfaces and algorithms to accurately compute intersections of tool swept surfaces with bones based on this voxel structure. This article then presents various volume manipulation algorithms to operate on virtual bones, bone grafts, and prostheses for bone and joint surgery simulations. A complicated knee arthroplasty illustrates the practicality and versatility of the proposed method.