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. 2017 Jun 23;7(1):4199.
doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-04454-6.

Computer-aided implant design for the restoration of cranial defects

Xiaojun Chen  1 , Lu Xu  2 , Xing Li  2 , Jan Egger  3   4
Affiliations

Computer-aided implant design for the restoration of cranial defects

Xiaojun Chen et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

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.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Evaluating one case of the cranial implant with the CT data of the patient.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The 3D printed crania model and implant.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The comparison between the implants designed using EasyCrania and traditional softwares: (A) the implant designed using EasyCrania, (B) the implant designed using traditional softwares, (C) the distance filed between the two implants.
Figure 4
Figure 4
The calculation of overlapping rate.
Figure 5
Figure 5
The overlapping rate of twenty users.
Figure 6
Figure 6
The overlapping rate of implant design for twenty times in the same case.
Figure 7
Figure 7
The architecture of EasyCrania.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Mirroring model: (A) the generated median plane, (B) the mirrored model based on the median plan and the cranial model.
Figure 9
Figure 9
Contour clipping: (A) the contour along the defect edge, (B) the implicit function computed from the contour, (C) the clipped model and (D) the view of the crania model and the clipped model.
Figure 10
Figure 10
Surface fitting: (A) the contour indicate the area for Delaunay triangulation, (B) the triangulated surface.
Figure 11
Figure 11
The generated initial implant.
Figure 12
Figure 12
The final implant: (A) the contour along the edge of the defect from inner surface of the crania model, (B) the final implant and the crania model, (C) and (D) different view of the final implant.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

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