Application of patient-specific 3D liver model fabricated by 3D printer from CT volumes to aid liver cancer surgery

摘要

During the liver cancer surgery, surgeons need to imagine anatomical structures of the liver, such as the position of the tumor, the vein and the portal vein from reference images like pre-operative CT images or 3D rendered views generated from CT images. However, it is difficult to understand precise anatomical structures only from 2D images such as CT images. Furthermore, the spatial relationship of these anatomical structures differ among patients. We fabricate a patient-specific 3D liver model by a 3D printer from CT volumetric images. This model is designed to assist a surgeon of the liver cancer surgery to understand anatomical structures. Patient-specific 3D liver models are fabricated from semi-automatic segmentation results of CT images of each patient. Surgeons highly evaluated utilization of patient-specific 3D liver models in real operation cases.