Spatial-Division Augmented Occupancy Field for Bone Shape Reconstruction from Biplanar X-Rays

TL;DR

This paper introduces SdAOF, a memory-efficient, continuous occupancy field approach for 3D bone shape reconstruction from biplanar X-rays, effectively handling occlusions and achieving high-resolution results.

Contribution

It proposes a novel spatial-division augmented occupancy field method that improves shape reconstruction resolution and occlusion handling over existing voxel-based deep learning models.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods on pelvis reconstruction

Enables fine-scale surface reconstruction at multiple resolutions

Effectively captures occlusion relationships in X-ray images

Abstract

Retrieving 3D bone anatomy from biplanar X-ray images is crucial since it can significantly reduce radiation exposure compared to traditional CT-based methods. Although various deep learning models have been proposed to address this complex task, they suffer from two limitations: 1) They employ voxel representation for bone shape and exploit 3D convolutional layers to capture anatomy prior, which are memory-intensive and limit the reconstruction resolution. 2) They overlook the prevalent occlusion effect within X-ray images and directly extract features using a simple loss, which struggles to fully exploit complex X-ray information. To tackle these concerns, we present Spatial-division Augmented Occupancy Field~(SdAOF). SdAOF adopts the continuous occupancy field for shape representation, reformulating the reconstruction problem as a per-point occupancy value prediction task. Its implicit and continuous nature enables memory-efficient training and fine-scale surface reconstruction at different resolutions during the inference. Moreover, we propose a novel spatial-division augmented distillation strategy to provide feature-level guidance for capturing the occlusion relationship. Extensive experiments on the pelvis reconstruction dataset show that SdAOF outperforms state-of-the-art methods and reconstructs fine-scale bone surfaces.The code is available at https://github.com/xmed-lab/SdAOF