Rapid prototyping assisted surgery planning

Abstract

In recent years, new surgical techniques have been developed to improve the quality of operations, reduce the risk to patients and reduce the pain experienced by patients. Prominent developments include minimally invasive surgery, robot-assisted hip operations, computer-assisted surgery (CAS) and virtual reality (VR). These developments have helped surgeons operate under difficult visual conditions. Rapid prototyping (RP) technology has also found applications in medicine. The RP technique is able to fabricate a representative, physical 3D model. This 3D model can enhance interpretation, visual and physical evaluation, and the rehearsal and planning of the surgical steps before a surgical operation is carried out in order to eradicate the trauma. This paper presents the procedures involved in the conversion of computerised tomography (CT) scan data to a useful physical model. A case study of a CT scanned file of a patient who had an injury to the right eye socket is presented. Three different RP systems (SLA, SGC and LOM) are benchmarked for comparison in terms of the surface finish, accuracies, visual appearance and processing speed. Because of the ability of RP to fabricate models that are complex in design with intricate features that may be hidden by undercuts, as demonstrated in this paper, the results of this research can be extended to applications in general engineering. One specific area of application would be reverse engineering.