A Bone Tumor Boundary Extraction Method Incorporating Envelope and Responsive Region for Robot-Assisted R0 Resection

The accurate extraction of accurate boundary of bone tumor is a prerequisite for surgical planning in robotic bone tumor resection. Current research mainly focuses on anatomy-based automatic or semi-automatic segmentation. We notice that besides the anatomically visible envelope of bone tumor, the responsive region should also be considered for the safe robot-assisted bone tumor resection. Based on this idea, this paper taking the femoral bone tumor as an example, proposes a bone tumor boundary extraction method incorporating envelope and responsive region for robot-assisted R0 resection. First, we automatically extract the envelope model of bone tumor utilizing the neural network and simplified its mesh model using the quadric edge collapse decimation algorithm. Then, we extend the envelope model to get preliminary bone tumor boundary model covering the responsive region using an offset along with the surface point normal of the envelope model. Finally, we calculate the intersection between the preliminary bone tumor boundary and the femoral condyle model to get the resulting bone tumor boundary. A case with clinical images is tested and assessed by surgeon which demonstrates the feasibly of the proposed method for robot-assisted accurate R0 resection.