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3D Printing in Interventional Radiology


Dr. Mike

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Just this past weekend I gave a presentation on uses of 3D printing in interventional radiology at the Western Angiographic and Interventional Society meeting in Vancouver, BC. It was very well received. In my opinion, there has not been enough work on applications in 3D printing for vascular procedures, such as those done in IR. Is anyone else involved in 3D printing for vascular applications: IR, vascular surgery, neurointervention, etc?

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Dr. Mike

 

I uploaded an STL file of a skull repair from Dicom data I obtained from the Osirix site. As a design engineer this is a reverse engineering type of application where we are taking raster data imaging and making a model from it. A high resolution scan can lead to data that has a million faces or more which is  more than my design software (Solidworks) can handle which is limited to 100,000 faces. I have no problem post processing and scaling the data back by decimating it to reduce the number of faces. The general geometry seems to be OK but I have concerns with measurement errors etc... caused by such a drastic reduction of data (85% for the file I processed). I am really interested in getting into the custom design of implants with precision design tools such as Solidworks or Inventor. The design packages have severe limitations to the number of raster points they can process. If I was modeling a skull or region of interest, to get the highest resolution model, I would have to scale the data back to only the region of interest and remove all areas that are not necessary. I am concerned anytime that I have to Decimate a model with regard to creating geometry errors. Is there a tool or a better way of doing this to create a model or am I generally on the right approach and have to accept the limitations.

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