USE OF GENERAL-PURPOSE MECHANICAL COMPUTER-ASSISTED ENGINEERING SOFTWARE IN ORTHOPEDIC SURGICAL PLANNING - ADVANTAGES AND LIMITATIONS

Two surgical plans were developed for an appropriately complex reconst ructive orthopaedic surgery case. One plan was developed with customar y methods using two-dimensional (2D) radiographs. The second plan was developed with general purpose mechanical computer assisted engineerin g (MCAE) software using x-ray computed tomography (CT) data. The limit ations of each method are identified. To create a surgical plan using three-dimensional (3D) medical datasets and MCAE software, five necess ary steps were identified: (a) data reduction; (b) contour extraction; (c) 3D model creation; (d) extraction of mass properties; (e) model i dealization. The principal limitation of general purpose MCAE software is the lack of pre-processing modules with which to address the uniqu e requirements of medical image datasets.