3D Patient-specific Modelling and Characterisation of Muscle-Skeletal Districts
This work addresses diagnostic and monitoring challenges for patients with muscle-skeletal pathologies, though it appears incremental in its methodological approach.
The paper tackles patient-specific modeling of muscle-skeletal districts by integrating 3D morphological and tissue information to support diagnosis and monitoring, with applications including localizing bone erosion in wrists for rheumatic diseases and characterizing spinal vertebrae for osteoporotic fractures.
This work addresses the patient-specific characterisation of the morphology and pathologies of muscle-skeletal districts (e.g., wrist, spine) to support diagnostic activities and follow-up exams through the integration of morphological and tissue information. We propose different methods for the integration of morphological information, retrieved from the geometrical analysis of 3D surface models, with tissue information extracted from volume images. For the qualitative and quantitative validation, we will discuss the localisation of bone erosion sites on the wrists to monitor rheumatic diseases and the characterisation of the three functional regions of the spinal vertebrae to study the presence of osteoporotic fractures. The proposed approach supports the quantitative and visual evaluation of possible damages, surgery planning, and early diagnosis or follow-up studies. Finally, our analysis is general enough to be applied to different districts.