With the increasing use of 3D medical imaging, it is possible to analyze 3D patient anatomy to extract features, trends and population specific shape information. This is applied to the development of ‘standard implants’ targeted to specific population groups. Human beings are diverse in their physical makeup while implants are often designed based on some key measurements taken from the literature or a limited sampling of patient data. The different implant sizes are often scaled versions of the ‘average’ implant, although in reality, the shape of anatomy changes as a function of the size of patient. The implant designs are often developed based on a certain demographic and ethnicity and then, simply applied to others, which can result in poor design fitment [1]. Today, with the increasing use of 3D medical imaging (e.g. CT or MRI), it is possible to analyze 3D patient anatomy to extract features, trends and population specific shape information. This can be applied to the development of new ‘standard implants’ targeted to a specific population group [2]. Our population analysis was performed by creating a Statistical Shape Model (SSM) [3] of the dataset. In this study, 40 full Chinese cadaver femurs and 100 full Caucasian cadaver femurs were segmented from CT scans using Mimics®. Two different SSMs, specific to each population, were built using in-house software tools. These SSMs were validated using leave-one-out experiments, and then analyzed and compared in order to enhance the two population shape differences.INTRODUCTION
PATIENTS & METHODS
