A bidirectional framework for fracture simulation and deformation-based restoration prediction in pelvic fracture surgical planning

Abstract

Pelvic fracture is a severe trauma with life-threatening implications. Surgical reduction is essential for restoring the anatomical structure and functional integrity of the pelvis, requiring accurate preoperative planning. However, the complexity of pelvic fractures and limited data availability necessitate labor-intensive manual corrections in a clinical setting. We describe in this paper a novel bidirectional framework for automatic pelvic fracture surgical planning based on fracture simulation and structure restoration. Our fracture simulation method accounts for patient-specific pelvic structures, bone density information, and the randomness of fractures, enabling the generation of various types of fracture cases from healthy pelvises. Based on these features and on adversarial learning, we develop a novel structure restoration network to predict the deformation mapping in CT images before and after a fracture for the precise structural reconstruction of any fracture. Furthermore, a self-supervised strategy based on pelvic anatomical symmetry priors is developed to optimize the details of the restored pelvic structure. Finally, the restored pelvis is used as a template to generate a surgical reduction plan in which the fragments are repositioned in an efficient jigsaw puzzle registration manner. Extensive experiments on simulated and clinical datasets, including scans with metal artifacts, show that our method achieves good accuracy and robustness: a mean SSIM of 90.7% for restorations, with translational errors of 2.88 mm and rotational errors of 3.18°for reductions in real datasets. Our method takes 52.9 s to complete the surgical planning in the phantom study, representing a significant acceleration compared to standard clinical workflows. Our method may facilitate effective surgical planning for pelvic fractures tailored to individual patients in clinical settings.