Intraoperative alignment assessment system and method

A system for registering at least a portion of a patient's spinal curvature and/or flexibility, comprising:

• an acquisition system for acquiring data using a continuous or discrete 3D-tracked acquisition along a skin surface of a spine of the patient, wherein a 3D-tracked probe visible to a tracking camera system is used to acquire the data by tracing over skin of the spine of the patient, wherein the data is used to identify a relationship between acquired points of data and centroids of vertebral bodies of the patient;
• a mechanical mechanism configured to link a top-half fiducial of a skin-mounted fiducial device to a bottom-half fiducial of the skin-mounted fiducial device that includes a winged clamping mechanism having one or more side clamps that revolve about a hinge joint via a pivot bearing:
• non-transient computer readable media for storing at least a portion of the acquired data;
• one or more computer processors implementing analyses on least a portion of the acquired data and generating a quantitative assessment of the patient's spinal biomechanical qualities;
• and the skin-mounted fiducial device containing a radiopaque marker visible in an x-ray image containing the spine, wherein the 3D-tracked probe is used to trace a portion of the skin-mounted fiducial device to register fiducial 3D coordinates axes in navigation camera coordinates;
• and wherein the acquisition system uses the acquired trace data to construct a bone surface contour of the spine based on the skin-mounted fiducial device as located in the x-ray image to generate at least one spine alignment parameter.