Manufacturing of Cardiac Models Through Rapid Prototyping Technology for Surgery Planning

摘要

Rapid Prototyping (RP) Technology is capable of fabricating 3D freeform solid models from CAD models and has been widely used in communicating design concepts. Due to its distinctive characteristics, RP is very suitable in aiding surgery planning. Typical medical software used to display cardiac images can delineate both inner and outer structure but its images are virtual. Therefore, solid cardiac models made by RP technology provide a touchable reality to compensate for this deficiency. In this research, RP technology is utilized to assist cardiac surgery planning. CT-scanned image data were first processed to obtain RP-acceptable STL file format, and then solid cardiac models were constructed by Objet QuadraTempo, a commercial RP system made in Israel. These models proved extremely helpful in cardiac surgery planning. In addition, several commercial RP systems are compared by their process capabilities for cardiac surgery planning application.