A preoperative planning system for osteotomies

The objective of the present work is to determine the influence of alignment accuracy and three-dimensional visualization on the outcome of high tibial osteotomies in orthopedic surgery.; The approach to this problem is to develop a three-dimensional preoperative planner for high tibial osteotomy. It assists the surgeon in planning and visualizing the result of an osteotomy in three dimensions. It works with an image-guided surgery system to carry out the three-dimensional plan.; The requirements of the pre-operative planner are a "surgeon friendly" design, easy control, real-time visual planning, flexible output, and improved quality of surgery. The planner was designed and developed accordingly. A preliminary test was performed to evaluate the experimental facilities produced to date. Design of future statistical analysis is also presented to evaluate the impact of the preoperative planner on improving the surgery in actual clinical settings.; This work indicates that three-dimensional planning could solve some problems found in current high tibial osteotomy. Three-dimensional planning can avoid undesirable internal/external rotations and imperfections in resection which cannot be controlled previously. It also facilitates better surgical access and intraoperative verification, thus making the computer-assisted osteotomy superior to the current manual process.