3D extended field-of-view of the knee joint bones using ultrasound: Application in orthopaedics

Patient Specific Instruments (PSIs) have been introduced into the surgical workflow as a modern way to assist the surgeon in performing femur and tibia resection in Total Knee Arthroplasty (TKA). These PSIs are based on an accurate reconstruction of the surface of the knee’s bones.In this work, we propose two 3D-3D image-based registration methods to reconstruct an extended field-of-view of the knee joint using only a motorized ultrasound transducer. Those methods are: (1) a dense voxel-based registration method, which needs to preprocess the ultrasound images and form an ultrasound volume. Then, computing the Mutual Information (MI) for each relative displacement to align every pair of volumes, (2) a sparse point-based registration method, which takes into account the point set located on the surface of the bone in ultrasound images. This method detects bony features using ORB detector and matches the corresponding points to find the best transformation using Coherent Point Drift (CPD).The preliminary qualitative results performed in vitro show that from a set of consecutive ultrasound volumes, an extended field-of-view can be reconstructed using only ultrasound images without any external trackers. Results of the voxel-based approach show that MI is more robust against noise comparing to other similarity measures. On the other hand, results of point-based approach show that is much faster in computation with a low false-positive rate compared to other feature-detectors like SIFT and SURF. Furthermore, experiments show that CPD is less affected by noisy data compared to the classical ICP, which is promising to continue evaluating our work in vivo.