Computer assisted osteotomy design for autografts in craniofacial reconstructive surgery

Abstract For reconstruction of some craniofacial defects which may be caused by trauma, removal of cancer, or due to congenital absence, the procedure of bone grafting is necessary. In this paper, we propose a method to identify an optimal donor site for autologous grafts. It is done by performing an optimization of appropriate surface based and voxel based similarity measures between donor region and a defined graft template. All generated solutions can be evaluated interactively by the surgeon on the computer display using an efficient graphical interface. By this approach, the operation time can be considerably shortened.