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Surgical reconstruction of posttraumatic and congenital skeletal deformity presents the surgeon with significant challenges in preoperative definition of the deformity, planning the surgery, and generating the implant or onlay. Contour Medical Systems has developed a system for surgical planning and reconstruction based on a 32 bit microcomputer, an intelligent color display system, and a numerically controlled milling machine.

Images from a GE8800 CT scanner serve as input to an interactive, menu-based graphics system which automatically extracts tissue interfaces such as the bony-soft tissue or soft tissue-air boundaries. The resulting surface of the bone or skin is presented on the color display as a shaded solid, viewable from many angles, for use in presurgical planning. Appropriately formatted data can also be output to a numerically controlled milling machine to generate a model of the structure of interest, thus providing the surgeon with an alternative method for visualization and planning.