Three-dimensional printing and 3D slicer powerful tools in understanding and treating neurosurgical diseases

Abstract

With the development of the 3D printing industry, clinicians can research 3D printing in preoperative planning, individualized implantable materials manufacturing, and biomedical tissue modeling. Although the increased applications of 3D printing in many surgical disciplines, numerous doctors do not have the specialized range of abilities to utilize this exciting and valuable innovation. Additionally, as the applications of 3D printing technology have increased within the medical field, so have the number of printable materials and 3D printers. Therefore, clinicians need to stay up-to-date on this emerging technology for benefit. However, 3D printing technology relies heavily on 3D design. 3D Slicer can transform medical images into digital models to prepare for 3D printing. Due to most doctors lacking the technical skills to use 3D design and modeling software, we introduced the 3D Slicer to solve this problem. Our goal is to review the history of 3D printing and medical applications in this review. In addition, we summarized 3D Slicer technologies in neurosurgery. We hope this article will enable many clinicians to leverage the power of 3D printing and 3D Slicer.

Untitled

“…There was a significant difference among vaccine types utilized (p = 0.0022). These are disliked by a retrospective study by Garrana et al [22]. They studied 150 CT scans and found insignificant differences in terms of age, sex, and vaccine types.…”

A workflow to visualize vertebrate eyes in 3D

“…3D visualization of human organs or body parts are already used in disciplines such as neurosurgery [ 23 ], orthopedic surgery [ 24 ], dental and maxillofacial surgery [ 25 ] for navigation, implant positioning, and also for individualized fabrication of custom designed implants. These systems are usually based on 3D data sets provided by Computer Tomography scanning techniques, Magnetic Resonance Imaging data sets, and other imaging methods such as ultrasound.…”

3D-printing of porous structures for reproduction of a femoral bone

“…Medical images of a right femur of a 30-year-old man were downloaded from an online database. The procedure involves 3D digital reconstruction of the medical images using 3D Slicer v4.11 software, 31 which allows a reading based on the Hounsfield scale, indicating the level of radiation absorption by the bone based on its density [32][33][34][35] (Figure 1).…”