Point-Based 3D Virtual Fixture Generation for Image-Guided/Robot-Assisted Surgery in Orthopedics

Virtual fixture (VF) has been playing a vital role in
robot-assisted surgeries, such as guiding surgical tools’ movement
and protecting a beating heart. In orthopedic surgery,
preplanned images are often used in the operating room, on
which planning curves might be drawn, for instance, to mark
out the boundaries for osteophytes to be removed. These curves
can be used to generate VF to assist in removing osteophytes
during the operation. A challenge is that the hand-drawn curves
usually have a random shape and cannot be mathematically
represented by equations, thus most of the existing algorithms
will not work in this scenario. In this paper, an algorithm of
VF generating based on point clouds is presented, with which
VF can be generated directly from cloud points, for example,
point clouds of hand-drawn curves extracted from an image.
The effectiveness of the VF algorithm is evaluated by a series of
simulations and experiments. The VF algorithm is also tested in
an image-based scenario and its effectiveness is demonstrated.
The presented point-based VF algorithm is promising to be used
in various applications in image-guided surgery to generate VF
for objects with various shapes.

See our lab website for more details and a copy of the paper: http://www.ece.ualberta.ca/~tbs (go to Publications).