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Review
. 2022 Oct 14:9:1030081.
doi: 10.3389/fsurg.2022.1030081. eCollection 2022.

Three-dimensional printing and 3D slicer powerful tools in understanding and treating neurosurgical diseases

Yijie You  1 , Yunlian Niu  2 , Fengbing Sun  1 , Sheng Huang  1 , Peiyuan Ding  1 , Xuhui Wang  1   3 , Xin Zhang  4 , Jian Zhang  1
Affiliations
Review

Three-dimensional printing and 3D slicer powerful tools in understanding and treating neurosurgical diseases

Yijie You et al. Front Surg. .

Abstract

With the development of the 3D printing industry, clinicians can research 3D printing in preoperative planning, individualized implantable materials manufacturing, and biomedical tissue modeling. Although the increased applications of 3D printing in many surgical disciplines, numerous doctors do not have the specialized range of abilities to utilize this exciting and valuable innovation. Additionally, as the applications of 3D printing technology have increased within the medical field, so have the number of printable materials and 3D printers. Therefore, clinicians need to stay up-to-date on this emerging technology for benefit. However, 3D printing technology relies heavily on 3D design. 3D Slicer can transform medical images into digital models to prepare for 3D printing. Due to most doctors lacking the technical skills to use 3D design and modeling software, we introduced the 3D Slicer to solve this problem. Our goal is to review the history of 3D printing and medical applications in this review. In addition, we summarized 3D Slicer technologies in neurosurgery. We hope this article will enable many clinicians to leverage the power of 3D printing and 3D Slicer.

Keywords: 3D printing; 3D slicer; additive manufacturing; neurosurgery; solid modeling.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Timeline of 3D printing technologies.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Schematic diagrams of 3D printing technologies main methods: (A) Basic principle of vat polymerization-based printing; (B) Basic principle of powder-based printing technologies; (C) Basic principle of extrusion-based technologies; (D) Basic principle of droplet-based printing.
Figure 3
Figure 3
3D slicer ecosystem. 3D Slicer consists of the lean application core, Slicer Modules, and Slicer Extensions. Languages (primarily C++, Python, and JavaScript) and library (Qt) provide higher-level functionality and abstractions. NA-MIC Kit components provide the tools and interfaces for the needs of the developers of medical image computing applications. CMake enables cross-platform build system configuration, packaging, testing of 3D Slicer and NA-MIC Kit libraries. VTK (Visualization Toolkit) provides the key building blocks for 3D computer graphics and visualization. ITK (The Insight Toolkit) is a library developed specifically for the tasks related to medical image registration and segmentation, and for implementing new image analysis algorithms. CTK (Common Toolkit) is a biomedical image computing library with a focus on application-level DICOM support, plugin framework, and specialized GUI widgets.
Figure 4
Figure 4
3D printing and 3D slicer in understanding and treating neurosurgical diseases.
Figure 5
Figure 5
3D printed skull and mold from high resolution CT scan data. (A,B) High resolution CT scan data; (C) virtual mold in 3D Slicer; (D) 3D printed skull.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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