Developing a Biomechanics Integrated Digital Twin for Enhanced Real-Time Guidance in Lumbar Pedicle Screw Fixation Surgery

In lumbar pedicle screw fixation surgeries, surgeons often face significant challenges in comprehensively understanding the hidden biomechanical information within the lumbar spine. While difficult to detect, this information significantly influences the success rate of the surgery and the postoperative stability. Traditional methods, such as finite element analysis, generally require some time for calculation and fail to meet the demands for real-time intraoperative monitoring. Accordingly, this paper proposes a dynamic simulation assistant method for lumbar pedicle screw fixation surgery based on a biomechanics integrated digital twin, which provides a novel real-time monitoring method during such surgeries. This approach encompasses both offline and online stages, integrating surgeons’ expertise, sensors, communication systems, artificial intelligence models, and visualization techniques. The method calculates the biomechanical information of lumbar pedicle screw fixation in real-time according to the surgeons’ operations and provides the possibility for intraoperative guidance and postoperative evaluation. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method has promising results in terms of prediction accuracy and time delay.