Consistently fitting orthopedic casts

Abstract

Personalized orthopedic casts largely improve the comfortability and functionality for patients compared to classical plaster casts. Current attempts on the geometric modeling of customized casts have not taken the swelling of the patients' broken extremities into account that causes a gradual deformation during the healing process. Thus, the shape of the injured body parts is not constant during wearing a cast, but may change along with a decreasing swelling. In this paper, we propose a framework for generating 3D printed personal casts that consistently fit and adapt to such deformations and allow to use a single cast throughout the whole healing process. The cast consists of two layers, an outer rigid layer, which provides enough strength and protection of the body parts and an underlying flexible layer that offers adaptability to the deformations. Both layers can be fabricated with standard 3D printers and easily be assembled around the injured body parts. We show a number of 3D printed results and demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.