Good clinical outcomes of Total Knee Arthroplasty (TKA) demand the ability to plan a surgery precisely and measure the outcome accurately. In comparison with plain radiograph, CT-based 3D planning offers several advantages. More specifically, CT has the benefits of avoiding errors resulting from magnification and inaccurate patient positioning. Additional benefits include the assessment in the axial plane and the replacement of 2D projections with 3D data. The concern on 3D CT-based planning, however, lies in the increase of radiation dosage to the patients. An alternative is to reconstruct a patient-specific 3D model of the complete lower extremity from 2D X-ray radiographs. This study presents a clinical validation of a novel technology called “3XPlan” which allows for 3D prosthesis planning using 2D X-ray radiographs.

After a local institution review board (IRB) approval, 3XPlan was evaluated on 24 patients TKA. Pre-operatively, all the patients underwent a CT scan according to a standard protocol. Image acquisition consisted of three separate short spiral axial scans: 1) ipsilateral hip, 2) affected knee and 3) ipsilateral ankle. All the CT images were segmented to extract 3D surface models of both femur and tibia, which were regarded as the ground truth. Additionally, 2 X-ray images were acquired for each affected leg and were used in 3XPlan to derive patient-specific models of the leg. For 3D models derived from both modalities (CT vs. X-ray), five most relevant anatomical parameters for planning TKA were measured and compared with each other. Except for tibial torsion, the average differences for all other anatomical parameters are smaller than or close to 3 degrees.