Title
A Direct Slicing Technique For The 3d Printing Of Implicitly Represented Medical Models
Abstract
In conventional medical image printing methods, volumetric medical data needs to be conversed into STereo Lithography (STL) format, the most commonly used format for representing geometric models for 3D printing. However, this STL conversion process is not only time consuming, but more importantly, it often leads to the loss of accuracy. It has become a critical factor hindering the printing efficiency and precision of organ models. By examining the key characteristics of discrete medical volume data, this paper proposes a direct slicing technique for printing implicitly represented 3D medical models. The proposed method mainly consists of three algorithms: (1) A layer-based contour extraction algorithm for discrete volume data; (2) An inner shell construction algorithm based on discrete point differential indentation; (3) An infill generation algorithm based on the constructed virtual contour and scan lines. The proposed method has been applied to the slicing of several organ models for experiments, and the ratios of time cost and memory cost between the conventional method and the proposed method are about 4-100 and 1.1 to 1.4 respectively, which demonstrate that the proposed method has a great improvement in both time and space performance when compared with the conventional STL-based method. Our technique extends the direct input format of geometric models for additive manufacturing. That is, discrete volume data can be used as a direct input for additive manufacturing without conversion to STL format.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1016/j.compbiomed.2021.104534
COMPUTERS IN BIOLOGY AND MEDICINE
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Slicing, 3D printing, Discrete medical volume data, G-code generator, Implicit modeling
Journal
135
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0010-4825
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qingqi Hong100.34
Lingli Lin200.34
Qingde Li300.34
Ziyou Jiang400.34
Jun Fang500.34
Beizhan Wang600.34
Kunhong Liu700.34
Qingqiang Wu800.34
Chenxi Huang911.36