Surgical simulation and evaluation in anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction with image-free navigation

A surgical simulation and evaluation method in the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction with image-free navigation was presented. Firstly, video tracking module, bone surface reconstruction module and virtual simulation module of this system were discussed. Secondly, the coordinate relations of several surgery objects (including surgical instrument, anatomical, camera and screen) in the surgical environment, the tracking based on MicronTracker with two cameras and the bone surface real-time reconstruction based on the Delaunay algorithm were introduced in detail. Finally, experiments of anisometry measurement and virtual simulation on two plastics were carried out to verify the validity of the proposed method. The anisometry value of reconstructed ACL was 8.970039mm. The effectiveness of ACL reconstruction has been proved by preliminary evaluation trials.