Real-time assessment of bone structure positions via ultrasound imaging

Computer-assisted orthopedic surgery allows clinicians to have better results and decreases the number of early prosthetic replacements. Nevertheless, the patient follow-up from pre-operative diagnosis to post-operative control cannot be assessed in a constant referential. In this paper, a real-time algorithm that extracts bone edges from images and, then, derives bony landmarks from these edges is proposed. Indeed, we assess in real-time the bone structure positions via ultrasound imaging to create a useful referential for pre-operative, intra-operative and post-operative measurements. To assist the clinician while acquiring bony anatomical landmarks, the extraction of the bone–soft tissue interface and bony landmarks from ultrasound images is done automatically. The experimentations were performed on a database of images from healthy volunteers, and the obtained results showed the efficiency and the stability of the performance of the proposed method.