Abstract
Congenital or posttraumatic bone deformity may lead to reduced range of motion, joint instability, pain, and osteoarthritis. The conventional joint-preserving therapy for such deformities is corrective osteotomy—the anatomical reduction or realignment of bones with fixation. In this procedure, the bone is cut and its fragments are correctly realigned and stabilized with an implant to secure their position during bone healing. Corrective osteotomy is an elective procedure scheduled in advance, providing sufficient time for careful diagnosis and operation planning. Accordingly, computer-based methods have become very popular for its preoperative planning. These methods can improve precision not only by enabling the surgeon to quantify deformities and to simulate the intervention preoperatively in three dimensions, but also by generating a surgical plan of the required correction. However, generation of complex surgical plans is still a major challenge, requiring sophisticated techniques and profound clinical expertise. In addition to preoperative planning, computer-based approaches can also be used to support surgeons during the course of interventions. In particular, since recent advances in additive manufacturing technology have enabled cost-effective production of patient- and intervention-specific osteotomy instruments, customized interventions can thus be planned for and performed using such instruments. In this chapter, state of the art and future perspectives of computer-assisted deformity-correction surgery of the upper and lower extremities are presented. We elaborate on the benefits and pitfalls of different approaches based on our own experience in treating over 150 patients with three-dimensional preoperative planning and patient-specific instrumentation.
Fürnstahl, Philipp