Juan José Jiménez-Delgado

Computer assisted preoperative planning of bone fracture reduction: Simulation techniques and new trends

The development of support systems for surgery significantly increases the likelihood of obtaining satisfactory results. In the case of fracture reduction interventions these systems enable surgery planning, training, monitoring and assessment. They allow improvement of fracture stabilization, a minimizing of health risks and a reduction of surgery time. Planning a bone fracture reduction by means of a computer assisted simulation involves several semiautomatic or automatic steps. The simulation deals with the correct position of osseous fragments and fixation devices for a fracture reduction. Currently, to the best of our knowledge there is no computer assisted methods to plan an entire fracture reduction process. This paper presents an overall scheme of the computer based process for planning a bone fracture reduction, as described above, and details its main steps, the most common proposed techniques and their main shortcomings. In addition, challenges and new trends of this research field are depicted and analyzed.

Alternatives for the generation of triangle meshes to represent bone fragments

AbstractThe use of computational techniques to help specialists in the treatment of bone injuries and diseases is widespread. These techniques usually require 3D triangle meshes representing bone f...

Mobile devices in the context of bone fracture reduction: challenges and opportunities

AbstractIn recent years, many computational techniques have been proposed to help specialists in the fracture reduction process. This field of research is open and faces important challenges due to its intrinsic high complexity. The reduction of a complex bone fracture requires identifying the bone fragments, to estimate their proper position and to select and place adequate fixation devices in order to stabilise the fracture. The development of computer-assisted techniques aids the planning and the execution of those tasks. In this paper, the possibilities of mobile and wearable devices in a fracture reduction process are introduced and discussed from a global perspective. Specifically, we have reviewed opportunities and challenges of mobile and wearable devices in the following stages of the treatment of a bone fracture: diagnosis, planning, training, aiding and rehabilitation. Regarding mobile devices, the focus is placed on the visualisation of medical data, the human–computer interaction-specific iss...

Initial Results of a Method for the Generation of Triangle Meshes Representing Bone Fragments using a Spatial Decomposition.

The generation of a virtual representation of the bones and fragments is an artificial step required in order to obtain helpful models to work with in a simulation. Nowadays, the Marching Cubes algorithm is a de facto standard for the generation of geometric models from medical images. However, bone fragments models generated by Marching Cubes are huge and contain many unconnected geometric elements inside the bone due to the trabecular tissue. The development of new methods to generate geometrically simple 3D models from CT image stacks that preserve the original information extracted from them would be of great interest. In order to achieve that, a preliminary study for the development of a new method to generate triangle meshes from segmented medical images is presented. The method does not modify the points extracted from CT images, and avoid generating triangles inside the bone. The aim of this initial study is to analyse if a spatial decomposition may help in the process of generating a triangle mesh by using a divide-and-conquer approach. The method is under development and therefore this paper only presents some initial results and exposes the detected issues to be improved.

Issues on the Simulation of Geometric Fractures of Bone Models

The simulation of realistic fracture cases on geometric models representing bone structures is almost an unexplored field of research. These fractured models have many applications in computer-assisted methods that support specialist in fracture reduction interventions. For instance, the generation of specific fracture patterns can provide uncommon cases for training simulators or even can be used to improve machine-learning applications. This paper focuses on the issues to be considered in the generation of fractures on geometric models that represent bone structures. The main recent contributions for fracturing geometric models are examined and the challenges in terms of the application of real bone fracture patterns on geometric models are presented. Moreover, different alternatives for the evaluation of the results obtained by the geometric fracture generation algorithms when applied to bone structures are showed. Finally, the potential applications of the virtual generation of specific bone fractures are described.