Quantifying Discrepancies at Positioning Custom 3D-Printed Surgical Guides for Bone Tumor Resection

A novel technique that uses computer-generated 3D-printed cutting guides for bone tumor resections has been previously studied and validated as compared to typical manual resections. Positioning of these guides is still a task that solely relies on surgeon’s expertise, therefore the need to account for any inevitable error introduce by human factors. This article presents a comparison between two experimental studies that used different techniques to quantify the positional error of cutting guide placement in terms of three rotation and three translations in space. The first study used still-image processing techniques and, the second, 3D-scanning analysis and surface deviation. Values obtained in these two studies will allow to design a surgical guide and sketch a cutting path that will account for positioning error and, ultimately, perform a safer and more accurate bone tumor resection.