Open Access

Purpose: Despite the success of total knee arthroplasty there continues to be a significant proportion of patients who are dissatisfied. One explanation may be a shape mismatch between pre and post-operative distal femurs. The purpose of this study was to investigate a method to match a statistical shape model (SSM) to intra-operatively acquired point cloud data from a surgical navigation system, and to validate it against the pre-operative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data from the same patients. Methods: A total of 10 patients who underwent navigated total knee arthroplasty also had an MRI scan less than 2 months pre-operatively. The standard surgical protocol was followed which included partial digitization of the distal femur. Two different methods were employed to fit the SSM to the digitized point cloud data, based on (1) Iterative Closest Points (ICP) and (2) Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM). The available MRI data were manually segmented and the reconstructed three-dimensional surfaces used as ground truth against which the statistical shape model fit was compared. Results: For both approaches, the difference between the statistical shape model-generated femur and the surface generated from MRI segmentation averaged less than 1.7 mm, with maximum errors occurring in less clinically important areas. Conclusion: The results demonstrated good correspondence with the distal femoral morphology even in cases of sparse data sets. Application of this technique will allow for measurement of mismatch between pre and post-operative femurs retrospectively on any case done using the surgical navigation system and could be integrated into the surgical navigation unit to provide real-time feedback.

We present a novel framework for fully automated and highly accurate determination of facial landmarks and dense correspondence, e.g. a topologically identical mesh of arbitrary resolution, across the entire surface of 3D face models. For robustness and reliability of the proposed approach, we are combining 2D landmark detectors and 3D statistical shape priors with a variational matching method. Instead of matching faces in the spatial domain only, we employ image registration to align the 2D parametrization of the facial surface to a planar template we call the Unified Facial Parameter Domain (ufpd). This allows us to simultaneously match salient photometric and geometric facial features using robust image similarity measures while reasonably constraining geometric distortion in regions with less significant features. We demonstrate the accuracy of the dense correspondence established by our framework on the BU3DFE database with 2500 facial surfaces and show, that our framework outperforms current state-of-the-art methods with respect to the fully automated location of facial landmarks.