Interactive Simulation and Visualization in Joint Replacement Surgery

We present a pre-operative planning tool for joint replacement surgery, which allows for a patient-specific selection of the optimal implant design, size and position. Based on a computational steering approach, our tool enables the surgeon to interact with digital models of bones and implants in a virtual 3D environment, and simultaneously computes and visualizes the load transfer between the implant and the bone in real-time. This allows the surgeon to interactively find an optimally shaped and positioned implant where the bone stress pattern is close to the pre-operative stress state, which is crucial to prevent stress shielding and consecutive effects of atrophy and aseptic loosening. Our tool runs on a multi-core PC with consumer-class graphics hardware (GPU).