Boolean Combinations of Implicit Functions for Model Clipping in Computer-Assisted Surgical Planning

This paper proposes an interactive method of model clipping for computer-assisted surgical planning. The model is separated by a data filter that is defined by the implicit function of the clipping path. Being interactive to surgeons, the clipping path that is composed of the plane widgets can be manually repositioned along the desirable presurgical path, which means that surgeons can produce any accurate shape of the clipped model. The implicit function is acquired through a recursive algorithm based on the Boolean combinations (including Boolean union and Boolean intersection) of a series of plane widgets’ implicit functions. The algorithm is evaluated as highly efficient because the best time performance of the algorithm is linear, which applies to most of the cases in the computer-assisted surgical planning. Based on the above stated algorithm, a user-friendly module named SmartModelClip is developed on the basis of Slicer platform and VTK. A number of arbitrary clipping paths have been tested. Experimental results of presurgical planning for three types of Le Fort fractures and for tumor removal demonstrate the high reliability and efficiency of our recursive algorithm and robustness of the module.