Abstract
BackgroundProducing a rich, personalized Web-based consultation tool for plastic surgeons and patients is challenging.Objective(1) To develop a computer tool that allows individual reconstruction and simulation of 3-dimensional (3D) soft tissue from ordinary digital photos of breasts, (2) to implement a Web-based, worldwide-accessible preoperative surgical planning platform for plastic surgeons, and (3) to validate this tool through a quality control analysis by comparing 3D laser scans of the patients with the 3D reconstructions with this tool from original 2-dimensional (2D) pictures of the same patients.MethodsThe proposed system uses well-established 2D digital photos for reconstruction into a 3D torso, which is then available to the user for interactive planning. The simulation is performed on dedicated servers, accessible via Internet. It allows the surgeon, together with the patient, to previsualize the impact of the proposed breast augmentation directly during the consultation before a surgery is decided upon. We retrospectively conduced a quality control assessment of available anonymized pre- and postoperative 2D digital photographs of patients undergoing breast augmentation procedures. The method presented above was used to reconstruct 3D pictures from 2D digital pictures. We used a laser scanner capable of generating a highly accurate surface model of the patient’s anatomy to acquire ground truth data. The quality of the computed 3D reconstructions was compared with the ground truth data used to perform both qualitative and quantitative evaluations.ResultsWe evaluated the system on 11 clinical cases for surface reconstructions and 4 clinical cases of postoperative simulations, using laser surface scan technologies showing a mean reconstruction error between 2 and 4 mm and a maximum outlier error of 16 mm. Qualitative and quantitative analyses from plastic surgeons demonstrate the potential of these new emerging technologies.ConclusionsWe tested our tool for 3D, Web-based, patient-specific consultation in the clinical scenario of breast augmentation. This example shows that the current state of development allows for creation of responsive and effective Web-based, 3D medical tools, even with highly complex and time-consuming computation, by off-loading them to a dedicated high-performance data center. The efficient combination of advanced technologies, based on analysis and understanding of human anatomy and physiology, will allow the development of further Web-based reconstruction and predictive interfaces at different scales of the human body. The consultation tool presented herein exemplifies the potential of combining advancements in the core areas of computer science and biomedical engineering with the evolving areas of Web technologies. We are confident that future developments based on a multidisciplinary approach will further pave the way toward personalized Web-enabled medicine.
Highlights
Since the creation of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, its use for medical applications has attracted much attention due to the possibilities of centralized storage and the efficient sharing of information
We tested our tool for 3D, Web-based, patient-specific consultation in the clinical scenario of breast augmentation
The consultation tool presented exemplifies the potential of combining advancements in the core areas of computer science and biomedical engineering with the evolving areas of Web technologies
Summary
Since the creation of the World Wide Web in the early 1990s, its use for medical applications has attracted much attention due to the possibilities of centralized storage and the efficient sharing of information. The creation of the picture archiving and communication system and related Web-enabled interfaces for the Internet demonstrates the interest from the medical community in accessing information in a reliable, economical, and convenient way [1,2]. Contrary to Web-enabled medical tools for education purposes, where standard data models are employed, the scenario is more complex when considering confidential patient-specific or personalized medical imaging data from 2-dimensional (2D) pictures. The tool presented in this paper was developed and tested in a multidisciplinary effort by a team of experts consisting of surgeons, biomedical engineers, computer graphic specialists, and Web developers and designers. Producing a rich, personalized Web-based consultation tool for plastic surgeons and patients is challenging
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