Bone morphological feature extraction for customized bone plate design

Fractures are difficult to treat because of individual differences in bone morphology and fracture types. Compared to serialized bone plates, the use of customized plates significantly improves the fracture healing process. However, designing custom plates often requires the extraction of skeletal morphology, which is a complex and time-consuming procedure. This study proposes a method for extracting bone morphological features to facilitate customized plate designs. The customized plate design involves three major steps: extracting the morphological features of the bone, representing the undersurface features of the plate, and constructing the customized plate. Among these steps, constructing the undersurface feature involves integrating a group of bone features with different anatomical morphologies into a semantic feature parameter set of the plate feature. The undersurface feature encapsulates the plate and bone features into a highly cohesive generic feature and then establishes an internal correlation between the plate and bone features. Using the femoral plate as an example, we further examined the validity and feasibility of the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves the convenience of redesign through the intuitive editing of semantic parameters. In addition, the proposed method significantly improves the design efficiency and reduces the required design time.