Automatic Extraction Method of Bone Tunnel of the Anterior Cruciate Ligament from Multi Detector Row Computed Tomography Data

The anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) plays very important role of rotational stability of the knee function. To recover the rotational stability of the ACL injured knee, double bundle technique has been developed which drills two bone tunnels in the femur and tibia, and connects the femur with the tibia by using double bundle graft. However the double bundle technique can cause bone tunnel enlargement which results in instability of the knee. The goal of this study is to examine shape of the bone tunnel enlargement from multi detector row computed tomography (MDCT) data. The proposed method was applied MDCT data of two patients who were performed ACL reconstruction. As a result, our proposed method could extract region of the bone tunnels from MDCT data, and calculate volume of the bone tunnels quantitatively. It reminds as a future work to confirm direction of the bone enlargement.