A Virtual Spine Construction Algorithm for a Patient - Specific Pedicle Screw Surgical Simulators

This paper presents an underlying study of a virtual spine construction as part of a surgical simulator. The goal is to create a patient - specific segmentation and rendering algorithm in two aspects, namely geometric modelling and material properties estimation. The spines are isolated from the CT scan data using an in house segmentation algorithm based on U - Net architecture, which are then rendered using the marching cube algorithm. Two rendering parameters (step size and voxel size) are tuned to give the best visual result. The material property are extracted from the gray scale values of the CT scan. The developed algorithm are bench - marked against an open source segmentation software.