Hello, I have been able to see in some surgical navigation systems (like Mako for example) selecting some points, the system can generate automatically a broader set of points in places of interest.
For example, in this case: Figure 1. A 3D image of the pelvis and three selected points.
Selecting those 3 points (A, B, C) is enough to generate these other set of points Figure 2. Points generated automatically.
Does anyone have any idea how to do these things, if there is any recommended methodology or algorithms? I suppose that in this case, it is possible adjust a circle to those 3 points and generate some points, but there would still be more points that cannot be generated from a circle.
Anyone have any ideas or recommendations on how to do these things?
Normally these surface points are acquired using a tracked stylus. Do you want to simulate this sampling?
You may consider posting this question (with some more details and clarifications) on the Slicer forum where hundreds of community members are using VTK for developing surgical planning and navigation systems (of course not completely from scratch but building on 3D Slicer).
The 3 points (A, B, C) are selected in the 3D model of figure 1 and later the system is able to automatically generate the set of points shown in figure 2.
Does the system displays the points that the user touched with the stylus or the system just randomly chose points of the surface near the 3 initial points?
@lassoan The system is capable of generating the points always with the same pattern from the same three initial points. The generating points are not random, you can see that they are displayed in specific areas and always the same amount in each area.
Sorry, it is still not clear for me why a surgical navigation system would generate this point pattern. Is it for patient registration? Which navigation system is this? How the patient registration is done?
@lassoan It is the Mako system and it generates that pattern of points for a registration process, but it always generates the same pattern of points from the three initial points mentioned above.
@Miguel_Socorro What means the color (blue, white) because, from the images, it seems that blue dots are further from the surface than white?
Is each point have a geometrical meaning (e.g. curvature) or is it a pattern? If it is a pattern, I will suppose that an ICP algorithm was used to align the pattern on the surface, using the 3 dots as initialization. It means also that you will need the template pattern to reproduce the result obtains by the software.
@Stephan_Hahn I really don’t know if the geometric meaning is related to a pattern or to certain curves. I think it must be a pattern, anyway I just needed to know what is the methodology used to work with these problems and your answer has helped me. Thank you.
