¹ University POLITEHNICA of Bucharest,
313, Splaiul Independentei, 060032, Bucharest 6, Romania
diana@mix.mmi.pub.ro, anton.hadar@upb.ro
² OSF Global Services,
99, Bd. Dacia, 020053, Bucharest 2, Romania
catalin.ilie@osf-global.com, raluca.barbur@osf-global.com

1. Introduction
   

Bridging the communication gap between doctors and engineers, enhancing the knowledge exchange and collaboration for developing personalized medical products are important objectives for both medicine and engineering [6], [7], [9] aiming at answering to the current growing demand of efficient and cost effective solutions for healthcare sector [15].

Personalized medicine means “providing the right treatment to the right patient at the right time” [4], one perspective of this approach being focused on designing, manufacturing and using customized instruments (such as surgical guides [3]) or implants [2] based on patient anatomical data.

In the same context, in the last couple of year, the number of e-health ICT systems and platforms increased significantly [14], all having the same general purposes: to improve the quality of care [10], to support medical decision [1], to enhance medical data visualization [13] or to remotely monitor patient health status [8].

Responding to these two trends: personalized medicine and e-health services, the research presented in this paper is focused on the development of a web-based platform for supporting the translation of orthopedic surgeons’ requirements into technical specifications for designing and manufacturing patient’ specific surgical guides (PSGs). Due to the fact these PSGs are customized to the patient anatomy they offer several important advantages: improvement of the accuracy of the surgical procedure, better orientation of the surgeon during intervention, decrease of the surgery time, risks of infections and costs.

PSGs match patient bones structures and are designed to contain geometrical features that materialize the pre-planned trajectory for a certain type of medical intervention (drilling, cutting). Their design (Figure 1) starts from patient Computer Tomography (CT) scanning data and involves: reconstructing the 3D model of the anatomical areas of interest and 3D modeling the surgical guide based on these areas, choosing the guide’ material and manufacturing process, building the physical prototype of the personalized guide (usually employing an Additive Manufacturing – AM process), sterilization and, finally, use in the operation room. Thus, PSGs’ design and manufacturing flow implies a tight surgeon-engineer cooperation and information sharing for correctly establishing the correspondence between medical requirements and design, material and manufacturing issues.

This collaboration is mandatory for all the process steps, the use of intelligent decision support systems representing the key for overcoming the miscommunication problems.

Hence the idea to develop a web-based platform (called POIGO) that provides, in a collaborative environment, the necessary knowledge and computer-aided tools for supporting the exchange of medical and technical information between surgeon and engineer.