Multi-body registration for fracture reduction in orthopaedic trauma surgery

Purpose. Fracture reduction is a challenging part of orthopaedic pelvic trauma procedures, resulting in poor long-term prognosis if reduction does not accurately restore natural morphology. Manual preoperative planning is performed to obtain target transformations of target bones – a process that is challenging and time-consuming even to experts within the rapid workflow of emergent care and fluoroscopically guided surgery. We report a method for fracture reduction planning using a novel image-based registration framework. Method. An objective function is designed to simultaneously register multi-body bone fragments that are preoperatively segmented via a graph-cut method to a pelvic statistical shape model (SSM) with inter-body collision constraints. An alternating optimization strategy switches between fragments alignment and SSM adaptation to solve for the fragment transformations for fracture reduction planning. The method was examined in a leave-one-out study performed over a pelvic atlas with 40 members with two-body and three-body fractures simulated in the left innominate bone with displacements ranging 0–20 mm and 0°–15°. Result. Experiments showed the feasibility of the registration method in both two-body and three-body fracture cases. The segmentations achieved Dice coefficient of median 0.94 (0.01 interquartile range [IQR]) and root mean square error (RMSE) of 2.93 mm (0.56 mm IQR). In two-body fracture cases, fracture reduction planning yielded 3.8 mm (1.6 mm IQR) translational and 2.9° (1.8° IQR) rotational error. Conclusion. The method demonstrated accurate fracture reduction planning within 5 mm and shows promise for future generalization to more complicated fracture cases. The algorithm provides a novel means of planning from preoperative CT images that are already acquired in standard workflow.