Atlas-based recognition of anatomical structures and landmarks to support the virtual three-dimensional planning of hip operations

This paper describes methods for the atlas-based segmentation of bone structures of the hip, the automatic detection of anatomical point landmarks and the computation of orthopedic parameters. An anatomical atlas was designed to replace interactive, time-consuming pre-processing steps needed for the virtual planning of hip operations. Furthermore, a non-linear gray value registration of CT data is used to recognize different bone structures of the hip. A surface based registration algorithm enables the robust and precise detection of anatomical point landmarks. Furthermore the determination of quantitative parameters, like angles, distances or sizes of contact areas, is important for the planning of hip operations. Based on segmented bone structures and detected landmarks algorithms for the automatic computation of orthopedic parameters were implemented. A first evaluation of the presented methods will be given at the end of the paper.