Interoperable Encoding and 3D Printing of Anatomical Structures

Fierens, Amaury [UCL] Gregoir, Thibault [UCL] Jodogne, Sébastien [UCL]

The rendering and printing of 3D models of anatomical structures offers a wide range of promising applications in multiple medical disciplines, in the training of medical students, as well as in patient education. The growing use of such 3D models in the clinical routine will soon imply great challenges in terms of data management, data archiving, and data exchange, since the commonplace file formats for 3D printing are not designed to store medical information, or to refer to other medical resources. This paper explores the use of the DICOM standard so that 3D models can be stored alongside standard medical images, inside a unified hospital information system, with full medical traceability and technical interoperability. A free and open-source software pipeline is introduced to generate 3D models either from binary bitmap volumes that were produced by artificial intelligence algorithms, or from contours that were manually delineated by physicians, then to encapsulate the generated models as DICOM instances. Our pipeline also features a lightweight Web viewer that is suitable for rendering DICOM STL instances by any Web browser. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, highlighting successful 3D model generation and printing.