Guidewire insertion planning for extracapsular hip fracture surgery

In orthopaedic management of extracapsular hip fracture surgery, surgeons usually make certain estimates via visual assessments of radiographs, relying on intuition and experience. One of such estimates is the position of the femoral head center during the insertion of the guidewire over which the implant is placed. This wields a large influence on the outcome of the intraoperative procedure. We propose a new method that computes the center of the femoral head by fitting a circle along the boundary of the femoral head where the center of the circle corresponds to the femoral head center. Six intraoperative digital x-ray images were used for simulation. The results show that the proposed technique is applicable to this kind of problem, reliable and repeatable with minimal errors. The method is also effective on poor radiographic images.