System and method of designing and manufacturing customized instrumentation for accurate implantation of prosthesis by utilizing computed tomography data

A system for designing a surgical guide for a joint replacement prosthesis comprising:

• a bone surface image generator for forming a bone surface image from three dimensional bone anatomical data for a patient's bone;
• a surgical guide image generator for generating a surgical guide image from the bone surface image and an image of a prosthesis implant imposed on the bone surface image;
• and
• a surgical guide image converter for generating control data to control operation of a machine for fabricating a surgical guide that corresponds to the surgical guide image.

A system for aiding a surgeon in a joint replacement operation comprising:

• a patient bone data repository for storing three dimensional data of a patient's bone;
• a reference pointer for providing positional data of a surgical site;
• a registration module for (i) receiving the positional data, (ii) correlating the positional data for the surgical site obtained from the reference pointer to the three dimensional data for the bone stored in the patient bone repository, and (iii) determining changes in the surface of the bone;
• and
• an image generator for generating an image of the patient's bone with an image of a prosthetic implant imposed on the image of the patient's bone.