Computer-aided implant design for the restoration of cranial defects
This addresses the need for more efficient cranial implant design in medical surgery, but it is incremental as it builds on existing geometry-based methods.
The authors tackled the problem of time-consuming manual design of patient-specific cranial implants by developing a novel software called EasyCrania, which improved design efficiency significantly with intra- and inter-rater reliability of 87.07+/-1.6% and 87.73+/-1.4% respectively.
Patient-specific cranial implants are important and necessary in the surgery of cranial defect restoration. However, traditional methods of manual design of cranial implants are complicated and time-consuming. Our purpose is to develop a novel software named EasyCrania to design the cranial implants conveniently and efficiently. The process can be divided into five steps, which are mirroring model, clipping surface, surface fitting, the generation of the initial implant and the generation of the final implant. The main concept of our method is to use the geometry information of the mirrored model as the base to generate the final implant. The comparative studies demonstrated that the EasyCrania can improve the efficiency of cranial implant design significantly. And, the intra- and inter-rater reliability of the software were stable, which were 87.07+/-1.6% and 87.73+/-1.4% respectively.