Predicting Surgical Safety Margins in Osteosarcoma Knee Resections: An Unsupervised Approach

According to the Pan American Health Organization, the number of cancer cases in Latin America was estimated at 4.2 million in 2022 and is projected to rise to 6.7 million by 2045. Osteosarcoma, one of the most common and deadly bone cancers affecting young people, is difficult to detect due to its unique texture and intensity. Surgical removal of osteosarcoma requires precise safety margins to ensure complete resection while preserving healthy tissue. Therefore, this study proposes a method for estimating the confidence interval of surgical safety margins in osteosarcoma surgery around the knee. The proposed approach uses MRI and X-ray data from open-source repositories, digital processing techniques, and unsupervised learning algorithms (such as k-means clustering) to define tumor boundaries. Experimental results highlight the potential for automated, patient-specific determination of safety margins. The full implementation and datasets are available at https://github.com/EdwinTSalcedo/OsteosarcomaUCB.