Preoperative fracture reduction planning for image-guided pelvic trauma surgery: A comprehensive pipeline with learning

Abstract

Pelvic fractures are among the most complex challenges in orthopedic trauma, which usually involve hipbone and sacrum fractures, as well as joint dislocations. Traditional preoperative surgical planning relies on the operator’s subjective interpretation of CT images, which is both time-consuming and prone to inaccuracies. This study introduces an automated preoperative planning solution for pelvic fracture reduction, addressing the limitations of conventional methods. The proposed solution includes a novel multi-scale distance-weighted neural network for segmenting pelvic fracture fragments from CT scans, and a learning-based approach to restore pelvic structure, combining a morphable model-based method for single-bone fracture reduction and a recursive pose estimation module for joint dislocation reduction. Comprehensive experiments on a clinical dataset of 30 fracture cases demonstrated the efficacy of our methods. Our segmentation network outperformed traditional max-flow segmentation and networks without distance weighting, achieving a Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 0.986 ± 0.055 and a local DSC of 0.940 ± 0.056 around the fracture sites. The proposed reduction method surpassed mirroring and mean template techniques, and an optimization-based joint matching method, achieving a target reduction error of (3.265 ± 1.485) mm, rotation errors of (3.476 ± 1.995)°, and translation errors of (2.773 ± 1.390) mm. In the proof-of-concept cadaver studies, our method achieved a DSC of 0.988 in segmentation and 3.731 mm error in reduction planning, which senior experts deemed excellent. In conclusion, our automated approach significantly improves traditional preoperative planning, enhancing both efficiency and accuracy in pelvic fracture reduction.