Design and Development of A Knee Surgery Planning System

Knee joint diseases have grown to be a major health risk and a planning system for knee surgery, such as Total knee arthroplasty (TKA), can be of great help. Knee surgery is very complex, requires multi-modal information and demands advanced skills. In this work, a surgical planning system has been designed, developed and demonstrated, with the aim to help surgeons get familiarized with the surgery, diagnose knee impairment, plan and optimize the operation procedures. First of all, the TKA procedures were analyzed. The tibia and femur bones are cut and artificial prostheses are implanted into the knee to relieve pain and recover the joint function. Then, the requirements, structure and implementation goals for the surgical planning system were defined. After that, the system was built up to realize the designed functionalities, including parsing of medical images from CT and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 3D reconstruction of the knee joint, segmentation of the regions of interest (ROIs), virtual osteotomy, measurement of spatial distance and angles, and simulated knee prosthesis installation. Finally, clinical imaging data were taken to demonstrate and validate system functionality.