Comparative Evaluation of Pelvic Allograft Selection Methods

Abstract

This paper presents a firsthand comparative evaluation of three different existing methods for selecting a suitable allograft from a bone storage bank. The three examined methods are manual selection, automatic volume-based registration, and automatic surface-based registration. Although the methods were originally published for different bones, they were adapted to be systematically applied on the same data set of hemi-pelvises. A thorough experiment was designed and applied in order to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each method. The methods were applied on the whole pelvis and on smaller fragments, thus producing a realistic set of clinical scenarios. Clinically relevant criteria are used for the assessment such as surface distances and the quality of the junctions between the donor and the receptor. The obtained results showed that both automatic methods outperform the manual counterpart. Additional advantages of the surface-based method are in the lower computational time requirements and the greater contact surfaces where the donor meets the recipient.

Three-Dimensional Virtual Bone Bank System Workflow for Structural Bone Allograft Selection: A Technical Report

“…Published studies on three-dimensional preoperative planning using virtual environments for allograft selection have reported benefits in pelvis and femur [11–14]. The use of this technology allowed optimizing the allograft selection in a bone bank, providing three-dimensional visual information to the surgeon before surgery is executed.…”

“…As well, if the host has to be compared against multiple available donors, the process would be very time consuming if it were to be performed manually [14]. Actually, the algorithms described in the cited articles were capable of automatically choosing the best allograft according to the size and shape criteria.…”