Automated preoperative planning of femoral stem in total hip arthroplasty from 3D CT data: atlas-based approach and comparative study.

Atlas-based methods for automated preoperative planning of the femoral stem implant in total hip arthroplasty are described. Statistical atlases are constructed from a number of past preoperative plans prepared by experienced surgeons in order to represent the surgeon's expertise of the planning. Two types of atlases are considered. One is a statistical distance map atlas, which represents surgeon's preference of the contact pattern between the femoral canal (host bone) and stem (implant) surfaces. The other is an optimal reference plan, which is selected as the best representative plan expected to minimize the deviation from the surgeon's preferred contact pattern. These atlases are fitted to the patient data to automatically generate the preoperative plan of the femoral stem. In this paper, we formulate a general framework of atlas-based implant planning, and then describe the methods for construction and utilization of the two proposed atlases. In the experiments, we used 40 cases to evaluate the proposed methods and compare them with previous methods by defining the errors as differences between automated and surgeon's plans. By using the proposed methods, the positional and orientation errors were significantly reduced compared with the previous methods and the size error was superior to inter-surgeon variability in size selection using 2D templates on an X-ray image reported in previous work.