Transcript:
Hello, dr. Mike here again with another quick tutorial on 3d printing in this tutorial, we’ll learn how to convert a CT scan into a 3d printable medical file of a skull in about 5 minutes using free open-source software, So let’s get started first. Start off by opening 3d slicer3d. Slicer is a free open-source software package for visualizing medical image files. Click on this icon and let it load up and drag and drop your DICOM dataset on to the 3d slicer window. Select copy. Your DICOM dataset will now start to load in 3d slicer as I was saying. Slicer is used for a lot of medical imaging research. It’s really a nice software package and the best thing about it is that it’s free and open source. It can be downloaded from slicer org. So when you’re. Dicom dataset is fully loaded. Go ahead and open this. TCGA zero Six five one four dataset. OK, now go to volume rendering turn on the eyeball to switch on volume rendering. Click this crosshairs to Center. I like to select a preset CT bone and adjust The slider until things are looking about right, then go to editor. Generic colors are fine, select bone threshold, effect tool and enter in an appropriate value, then click apply next. We’re going to go to the make model effect tool and what this is going to do. Is it’s going to allow us to convert this selected tan-colored section into a surface model, and you’ll see that after clicking apply that the the 3d rendering in the corner over here is going to change there we go, and when it does now we can save our surface model. Unselect all this stuff. Click bone. STL, and I’ve created a special folder here and click. Save so now! Our file is here as a bone bone, STL file, open blender and select import STL file. We’ll go to that tutorial and select bone now. Blender is a another free open-source software package that is primarily used for CGI animation, It’s really a powerful software package and has a lot of great mesh editing, tools and features and the best thing about it is that it is also free and open-source your model will be imported and it will not be centered, so click geometry to origin to Center it and you’ll see that there’s going to be a lot of these bone islands all around the model that we need to get rid of, so I’m going to go to edit mode. These models are are captured when we convert it. The Dicom image set to STL because they’re also of the appropriate density, So I’m going to select a random vertex in this model hit Ctrl L to select all contiguous ctrl. I to invert that selection, and now we’ve got all of our bone Islands selected and we can subsequently delete them by hitting the X key and then select TV to delete the vertices. I’m gonna go back to object mode and my computer. This is a little slow because we’re dealing with almost one and a half million vertices here. I’m going to go to modifiers and apply a smoothing algorithm to this and you’ll see that when I do that, this gets all smoothed over. Click apply now that kind of jagged stair-step appearance of the skull has been resolved. And I’m gonna save this new new file as bone smooth so by applying the smoothing algorithm, I’ve made the surface of the bone. A little more realistic, actually, a lot more realistic when compared to the file that was outputted from 3d slicer, so it that was volumetric, so it had very jagged appearance finally. I’m gonna open mesh mixer, which is freely available from Autodesk. And I’m gonna open that bone, smooth file that I just created in blender and Autodesk is gonna think about it for a while. It’s a relatively large file with about one and a half million vertices now. I’m going to go to analysis and inspector and any errors in the mesh will have red lines and be highlighted. And it looks OK. So this file is now ready for 3d printing. You can send it to your 3d printer and it should print without any trouble. That was a very, very quick of approximately 5 minute tour on how to create a 3d printable skull from a medical imaging scan in less than 5 minutes or about 5 minutes using free open-source software. Thank you very much stay tuned for a more detailed tutorial that will go over all of these steps, which will be appearing on my blog soon. Have a good day.