Patent ID: 8808301

Claim:
A method of creating a surgical guide, comprising the steps of: imaging a patient's bone-to-bone joint; collecting a set of images of the patient's bone-to-bone joint; generating a first mask on the set of images; processing the first mask to remove artifacts; generating a second mask on the set of images; processing the second mask to remove artifacts; merging the first and second masks and cropping the merged masks to highlight attachment points of a ligament; generating a third mask by filling in any holes between the two merged masks; generating a three dimensional image of the highlighted ligament attachment points; generating a reverse image of the three dimensional image of the highlighted ligament attachment points; slicing the reverse image allowing access to contours of the bones in the reverse image; creating a reverse template of each of the ligament attachment points; creating a three dimensional model of each template; and generating a surgical guide from the three dimensional model of each of the templates, wherein the surgical guides each consists of a body, a tooling guide, and at least one face adapted to fit the interstitial space between the bones of the joint and inversely contoured to a shape of the patient's joint anatomy, wherein the at least one face is disposed on a proximal end of the body, and the tooling guide is disposed on a distal end of the body.