Construction of occipital bone fracture using B-spline curves

Abstract

Treating trauma to the cranio-maxillofacial region is a great challenge and requires expert clinical skills and sophisticated radiological imaging. The aim of reconstruction of the facial fractures is to rehabilitate the patient both functionally and aesthetically. In this article we employed B-spline curves to construct the occipital bone fracture using Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) format data. The construction of occipital bone fracture starts with the boundary extraction followed by corner detection, construction of fractured part inner outer curve for each DICOM data using B-spline curves and finally the construction of fractured part in DICOM format. Method used in this article is based on DICOM data only and does not require any technique such as mirror imaging, technical help, reference skull, or to take average thickness of skull bone. Using the proposed method, the constructed fractured implant is custom made for every individual patient. At the end of this article we present a real case, in which we have constructed the occipital bone fracture using B-spline. The proposed method has been validated using post-operation DICOM data. For practical application, Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been developed.