A Semi-automatic Cranial Implant Design Tool Based on Rigid ICP Template Alignment and Voxel Space Reconstruction
This addresses a critical medical problem for patients needing neurocranial repair, but it is incremental as it builds on existing methods like rigid ICP alignment and voxel space reconstruction.
The paper tackles the complex and expensive task of designing patient-specific cranial implants for cranioplasty by developing a semi-automatic tool with a graphical user interface, showing that alignment can be significantly improved by focusing on clipped geometry near the defect border.
In traumatic medical emergencies, the patients heavily depend on cranioplasty - the craft of neurocranial repair using cranial implants. Despite the improvements made in recent years, the design of a patient-specific implant (PSI) is among the most complex, expensive, and least automated tasks in cranioplasty. Further research in this area is needed. Therefore, we created a prototype application with a graphical user interface (UI) specifically tailored for semi-automatic implant generation, where the users only need to perform high-level actions. A general outline of the proposed implant generation process involves setting an area of interest, aligning the templates, and then creating the implant in voxel space. Furthermore, we show that the alignment can be improved significantly, by only considering clipped geometry in the vicinity of the defect border. The software prototype will be open-sourced at https://github.com/3Descape/Cranial_Implant_Design