Atlas-based determination of anatomical landmarks to support the virtual planning of hip operations

A method for an automatic reliable and precise detection of anatomical landmarks based on triangulated surface models of bone structures is presented. By means of a surface-based registration procedure, manually specified landmarks on the atlas surface are transferred automatically to the patient's surface. In a pre-processing step, initial landmark positions on the patient's surface are automatically determined to restrict the registration to a surface area. During the registration process, apart from the Euclidean distances of the surface points, the surface-normals and a new local curvature measure for triangulated surfaces are used. Finally, an evaluation of the proposed method is presented.