03 Patient Specific Intervention Planning in CMF Surgery

		Three dimensional rendering of the manually segmented reference head used throughout development.

The aim of this project is to create a single integrated console for planning complex facial interventions in cranio-maxillo-facial surgery. This new console will integrate and extend earlier results from Co-Me phases 1 and 2. The work flow of the new platform will be optimized in close cooperation with surgeons which are familiar with the currently used state-of-the-art tools. The new platform will be based on a consistent data flow seamlessly integrating the different stages from imaging, segmentation, simulation to navigation and thus eliminate the often cumbersome data transfer between the different application programs. The amount of manual intervention, currently still necessary for data segmentation, will be dramatically reduced and novel real-time tissue simulation techniques will be developed and integrated.

Work Packages

WP 1 - Skull and Soft Tissue Segmentation

This work package aims at developing efficient skull and soft-tissue segmentation methods using CT and special MR sequences.

WP 2 - Assessment of Structural and Mechanical Properties of Skeletal Muscle with MRI

Besides the in-vivo assessment of the mechanical tissue properties using MR elastography (non-invasive method to measure the stiffness and strain of soft tissue), specific MR sequences that optimize soft-tissue contrast are developed in this work package.

WP 3 - Characterization of the Mechanical Response of Soft Facial Tissue

Methods to measure the mechanical properties of the tissue (using an aspiration device) and to characterize the phenomenological equations of the non-linear mechanical behavior are the research focus of this work package.

WP 4 - Soft Tissue Modeling for CMF Interventions

A hybrid approach modeling facial tissue deformations in real-time is developed in this work package. The approach combines a physically-based soft tissue modeling technique specifically tailored for CMF with a highly accurate pre-computed FEM library of deformations that is driven by an interpolation component for interactive and fast simulation of highly detailed face models while retaining realism.

WP 5 - Robot-Guided Laser Osteotomy

This work package deals with issues related to robot-guided laser osteotomy to allow for complex cutting geometries while controlling the depth in real-time.

Project Coordination