Fuzzy ultrasonic array system for locating screw holes of intramedullary nail

Abstract

In this paper, we describe an ultrasonography system for locating screw holes of intramedullary nail by one-direction freehand scanning using an ultrasonic array probe. Although conventional X-ray method can visualize the nail in the femur, it has serious problem of X-ray exposure. We propose a locating method of the nail screw holes by an ultrasonic array probe. We extract screw hole regions by calculating two fuzzy degrees: average of the intensity and variance of the intensity using fuzzy inference. Next, we do a registration between the obtained image with the true image, where the true image is the nail image obtained by scanning an array probe to the nail exactly. As the result, we could calculate the center distance of two screw holes within an error of 1.0 mm.