Abstract
In cranioplasty, neurosurgeons use bone grafts to repair skull defects. To ensure the protection of intracranial tissues and recover the original head shape for aesthetic purposes, a custom-made pre-fabricated prosthesis must match the cranial incision as closely as possible. In our previous study (Liao et al. in Med Biol Eng Comput 49:203-211, 2011), we proposed an algorithm consisting of the 2D snake and image registration using the patient's own diagnostic low-resolution and defective high-resolution computed tomography (CT) images to repair the impaired skull. In this study, we developed a 3D multigrid snake and employed multiresolution image registration to improve the computational efficiency. After extracting the defect portion images, we designed an image-trimming process to remove the bumped inner margin that can facilitate the placement of skull implants without manual trimming during surgery. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, a set of skull phantoms were manufactured to simulate six different conditions of cranial defects, namely, unilateral, bilateral, and cross-midline defects with 20 or 40% skull defects. The overall image processing time in reconstructing the defect portion images can be reduced from 3 h to 20 min, as compared with our previous method. Furthermore, the reconstruction accuracies using the 3D multigrid snake were superior to those using the 2D snake.
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have