Design of proposed software system for prediction of iliosacral screw placement for iliosacral joint injuries based on X-ray and CT images

Abstract

One of the crucial tasks for the planning of surgery of the iliosacral joint is placing an iliosacral screw with the goal of fixing broken parts of the pelvis. Tracking of proper screw trajectory is usually done in the preoperative phase by the acquisition of X-ray images under different angles, which guide the surgeons to perform surgery. This approach is standardly complicated due to the investigation of 2D X-ray images not showing spatial perspective. Therefore, in this pilot study, we propose complex software tools which are aimed at making a simulation model of reconstructed CT (DDR) images with a virtual iliosacral screw to guide the surgery process. This pilot study presents the testing for two clinical cases to reveal the initial performance and usability of this software in clinical conditions. This model is consequently used for a multiregional registration with reference intraoperative X-ray images to select the slide from the 3D dataset which best fits with reference X-ray. The proposed software solution utilizes input CT slices of the pelvis area to create a segmentation model of individual bone components. Consequently, a model of an iliosacral screw is inserted into this model. In the next step, we propose the software CT2DDR which makes DDR projections with the iliosacral screw. In the last step, we propose a multimodal registration procedure, which performs registration of a selected number of slices with reference X-ray, and based on the Structural Similarity Index (SSIM) and index of correlation, the procedure finds the best match of DDR with X-ray images. In this pilot study, we also provide a comparative analysis of the computational costs of the multimodal registration upon various numbers of DDR slices to show the complex software performance. The proposed complex model has versatile usage for modeling and surgery planning of the pelvis area in fractures of iliosacral joints.