Evaluation of geometric deviations in rapid prototyped phantoms created from medical imaging data (on the example of computed tomography)
Aim of study. To evaluate the geometric deviations associated with creation of physical objects from computed tomography data using computer-aided design and additive manufacturing. Materials and methods. The source object was created using the FreeCAD application; Blender and Meshmixer software was used for polygon meshes correction and transformation. 3D printing was carried out on an Ender-3 printer with copper-impregnated polylactide plastic BFCopper. Scanning was performed using a 128-slice tomograph Philips Ingenuity CT. A series of tomographic images were processed in 3DSlicer software, used to create virtual models by semiautomatic segmentation with threshold values of 500 HU, 0 HU, -500 HU, -750 HU and manual segmentation. Reproduced and reference polygon meshes were compared using Iterative Closest Point algorithm in CloudCompare software. Results. Reproduced models volume exceeded the volume of respective reference models by 1-27%. The average point cloud linear deviation values of reproduced models from the reference ones were 0.03-0.41 mm. A significant correlation between integral sums of linear deviations and changes in the volume of reproduced models was shown using Spearman's rank correlation coefficient ( = 0.83; temp = 5.27, significance level p = 0.05). Conclusion. The geometry of the reproduced object changes inevitably, while the linear deviations depend more on the chosen segmentation method rather than on the overall size of the model or its structures. Manual segmentation method can lead to greater linear deviations, though it allows to save all the necessary structures.