Automatic bone fracture reduction by fracture contact surface identification and registration

Bone fracture reduction is an essential step in the treatment of orthopedic fractures. It consists of determining the position and orientation of the fractured bone fragments for their fixation with implants. This paper presents a new method for the automatic reduction of fractured bone models derived from CT scans. The method identifies the bones fracture contact surface pairs based on the fragments surfaces maximum principal curvature and their intensity profiles in the CT scan. It then aligns the two fracture surfaces by rigid registration, thereby obtaining a virtual bone fracture reduction. An experimental evaluation of 192 simulated femoral fractures derived from four clinical CT scans yielded a mean target registration error of 1.8mm (std=1.1mm).