Abstract
The usefulness of 3-dimensional (3D)-printed disease models has been recognized in various medical fields. This study aims to introduce a production platform for patient-specific 3D-printed brain tumor model in clinical practice and evaluate its effectiveness. A full-cycle platform was created for the clinical application of a 3D-printed brain tumor model (3D-printed model) production system. Essential elements included automated segmentation software, cloud-based interactive communication tools, customized brain models with exquisite expression of brain anatomy in transparent material, adjunctive devices for surgical simulation, and swift process cycles to meet practical needs. A simulated clinical usefulness validation was conducted in which neurosurgeons assessed the usefulness of the 3D-printed models in 10 cases. We successfully produced clinically applicable patient-specific models within 4 days using the established platform. The simulated clinical usefulness validation results revealed the significant superiority of the 3D-printed models in surgical planning regarding surgical posture (p = 0.0147) and craniotomy design (p = 0.0072) compared to conventional magnetic resonance images. The benefit was more noticeable for neurosurgeons with less experience. We established a 3D-printed brain tumor model production system that is ready to use in daily clinical practice for neurosurgery.
Highlights
The usefulness of 3-dimensional (3D)-printed disease models has been recognized in various medical fields
The current best practice in neurosurgical planning largely depends on the conceptual reconstruction of lesions in the surgeon’s head based on 2-dimensional magnetic resonance (MR) images or computer-aided image reconstruction incorporated into neuro-navigation, which
When the user designates the region of interest (ROI), the specified ROI is replaced with seed information, and segmentation is performed for the area with the same seed information, such as the specified ROI, using the graph-cut algorithm (Fig. 1A), which is the core algorithm of MEDIP software
Summary
The usefulness of 3-dimensional (3D)-printed disease models has been recognized in various medical fields. This study aims to introduce a production platform for patient-specific 3D-printed brain tumor model in clinical practice and evaluate its effectiveness. Patient-specific disease models, guaranteeing precise definition of disease extent and detailed reflection of related anatomical structures, are undoubtedly useful in planning surgery for individual p atients[5,6,7] To apply this patient-specific surgical planning system to real-world clinical practice, a well-organized interactive process ranging from design to production in a reasonable time is a vital element. In the field of neurosurgery, the applications of patientspecific 3D-printed brain disease models have expanded, and several studies proved the effectiveness of these models for trainee education, patient education, surgical planning and simulation[24,26,28,29]. We present our newly developed clinical application platform for patient-specific 3D-printed models of brain tumor patients and verification of its usefulness through a simulated clinical use
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