A Prototype System for Three-Dimensional Cardiac Modeling and Printing with Clinical Computed Tomography Angiography

To help physicians and their assistants plan, rehearse and follow up a surgical therapy with a computer device, people may carry out a three-dimensional (3-D) cardiac modeling by digital image processing algorithms and a 3-D cardiac printing by appropriate materials, according to the DICOM data of patient’s heart acquired by an advanced computed tomography angiography (CTA) device in a hospital. In this work, we introduce the design and implementation of a prototype system of 3-D cardiac modeling and printing. Firstly, we converted the CTA data of the heart from the original DICOM format to the.mat format within the Matlab programming environment. Secondly, we carried out the 3-D image segmentation with the region growing to semi-automatically determine the region of interest (ROI), i.e., the cardiac tissue, by sequentially processing the CT image slices. Thirdly, we performed the 3-D modeling and volume rendering for the binary volume image of the cardiac tissue. Lastly, we converted the 3-D modeling into STL format and sent it to the table-top 3-D printer mounted in our lab, generated the corresponding G codes by Flashprint software to manipulate the 3-D printer. It is noted that the software part of the prototype system was developed within Matlab and performed well for the expected task.