Laplacian Musculoskeletal Deformation for Patient-Specific Simulation and Visualisation

Abstract

In many biomedical applications, it is often desired to simulate, analyse and visualise the dynamics of a particular patient based on a patient-specific musculoskeletal model. However, reconstructing a patient-specific model directly from medical images is highly labour intensive, and impractical in the clinical context. A more efficient method is to derive it from an atlas musculoskeletal model using patient-specific hints. In this paper, Laplacian mesh processing is introduced to deform an atlas model to a patient-specific model, based on patient-specific landmarks extracted from two orthogonal clinical images and using least-squares error optimization. Muscle attachment landmarks and motion landmarks in the atlas are also transformed as part of the process. Drift and inter-surface penetrations are prevented by supplementary inter-surface landmarks. Mesh simplification and reconstruction are used to avoid out-of-memory failures that may result from trying to deform models at high resolution.