Determination of Position and Radius of Ball Joints

For successful ball-joint replacement surgery, it is important to maintain the joint's geometric center. Pre-operative detection of this center is achieved by detecting the sphere that fits onto the articular surfaces in CT or MRI images. We have developed a novel technique to automatically determine the sub-voxel position and size of a sphere in unsegmented 3D images. The method is invariant to size and robust to noise. It only needs one fourth of a sphere to detect the center. Isotropically as well as anisotropically sampled images can be used. As no segmentation is required, it can be applied directly to clinical images.

@InProceedings { GVBV02a,
  author       = "Glas, Marjolein van der and Vos, F.M. and Botha, Charl P. and Vossepoel, A.M.",
  title        = "Determination of Position and Radius of Ball Joints",
  year         = "2002",
  note         = "spiemi2002-4684",
  url          = "http://graphics.tudelft.nl/Publications-new/2002/GVBV02a"
}