Volumetric accuracy for rapid prototyping models,

Abstract

Rapid prototyping, a technology for producing threedimensional models or replicas of objects of interest, has become an important tool for surgical planning, prosthesis manufacturing and assisting diagnosis. Crucial for these medical applications is the geometric accuracy of the models. Current research on evaluating the geometric accuracy of rapid prototyping has focused in identifying two or more specific anatomical landmarkson the analyzed structure and the constructed model, and to compare the relative linear distances. As a complementary accuracy metric, we propose to use volumetric intersection indexes computed over CT scans of the original structure and the model. The metric involves a mutual information based registration, aMumford-Shah based active contour and volumetric calculations. Our results show that our metric can be applied without any modification to models built from different structures, and provide simple and meaningful quantitative indexes to measure the volumetric accuracy of models built with rapid prototyping technology.