Point-Based 3D Virtual Fixture Generating for Image-Guided and 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).