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Ask HN: How can I 3D print my skeleton for research?

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Re: Ask HN: How can I 3D print my skeleton for research?

#41

I've 3D printed my brain - I'm a biomedical engineer, and for a while was working for a research institute in France. While there, I had many friends and acquaintances who were doctors or surgeons performing their own research work. I had made noises in the past that I really wanted to print my brain sometime, so one of them referred me to an observational study in the area using fMRI to observe the brain performing…

I did the same - participated in an MRI study & asked for a copy of the scan data. They gave it to me on a CD which I promptly lost while moving.

Back up your brains people!

Re: Ask HN: How can I 3D print my skeleton for research?

#42
I've done quite a bit of 3D modeling using medical imaging working with various MDs for exploratory research projects.

For contrast, you'll want a CT because MRI typically isn't great for bone features but that inherently has radiation exposure which I doubt you'll have an MD sign off on if you're perfectly healthy. I don't recommend this personally but...

Ignoring that, most all radiology/medical imaging, especially anything CT based, uses DICOM as a standard data format. Many applications can read this data (everything from Photoshop, Matlab/Octave to libraries for languages if you want to go that far) but I highly recommend using 3D Slicer for your data processing: https://www.slicer.org/

It's a fantastic piece of software often used in medical research for computational analysis work. It will allow you to import the DICOM data, read the metadata correctly to adjust/apply transformations on the data, and position the image frames in space correctly. From those frame stacks, you'll be able to do all sorts of things from volumetric viewing (computing interframe voxels), applying pre-mapped imaging specific color maps to the data, 3D volumetric rendering (with stereo support), and slicing/clipping which will all be useful.

There are lots of tutorials and even videos online for extracting 3D surface meshes from the 3D image data using Slicer. Some automatic thresholding will be useful to speed the process but you'll find for ball-and-socket joints, you'll have tediously define these regions on the 2D images frame by frame. From my experience the spine is the absolute worst based on the way the 3D geometries interlock. Assuming you have a high enough spatial resolution CT or series of independent CT scans, you'll likely need to step through the entire spinal column frame-by0frame to produce quality surface meshes. This process took me a good 4-8 hours just to do 4 lumbar vertebrae on a patient manually (constantly checking 3D geometry references to see if what I was doing was correct).

Once you're done with all of that, you'll then need to export all of these individual surface meshes (I'm guessing you'll want them independently segmented to play with/assemble, plus it'll likely be needed for 3D printing), you may need to down-sample/simplify the surface meshes and smooth them for printing. This can be done with a number of 3D modeling tools like Blender but I recommend Meshlab personally. There are a lot of approaches for this, google is your friend.

STL (or other surface mesh formats, say OBJ) will of course lose the DICOM metadata and scaling may become an issue depending on how Slicer exports the data and any additional post-processing you may do, so keep that in mind before printing that scaling may not be 1:1.

I used a cheap online printing service for my vertebrae project and scaled one of the lower lumbar vertebrae to about 1/7th actual scale for printing and that cost me about $30. A full scale lumbar vertebrae from the same service cost nearly $200 (this was about 6 years ago, no clue what prices are now). There may be better options.

You may also need to keep in mind 3D printing limitations during the entire process. Some 3D printers have maximum bounding box sizes (those arms only move so far) so your model can only be so big which may require you to break it into smaller parts and connect back together (glue? IDK, I've never done this). You can also shop around for services that can 3D print larger structures (I'm sure there's plenty) or do it yourself with some hacked out DIY 3D printer.

Most of the projects I worked on did this type of work because physically modeling bone in the real world with correct materials is quite difficult due to a lot of factors (I only 3D printed a scaled down vertebrae from one project as a keepsake for the work I did). Bones, for example, have a lot of smaller internal microstructures you may need to account for which was a critical concern since we were attempting to model bone fractures on a specific patient's vertebrae for a proposed experimental procedure and new process from a neurosurgeon. If you're interested in that sort of modeling, I found voxel based physical modeling techniques that work better than the finite element method/finite element analysis the group mechanical engineers suggested (he was comfortable with FEA/FEM).

The mechanical engineers working with us initially wanted to get cadavers in their lab do various physical stress tests on bone, but that was ruled out early on since we pointed out structural properties of decaying bodies were likely not representative of living bone/cellular structures (besides the "hey, dead bodies/limbs in our lab" fact)--plus, hey, computational science and modeling is cool ;)

Re: Ask HN: How can I 3D print my skeleton for research?

#43
post #19
post #5

MRI may work... I think there's a skeletal MRI. That will be extremely expensive. CT scan probably would work, but I don't think they'll let you dose yourself with that many X-Rays for fun. Most of these scanners give you voxel data, which you can then threshold some way and generate a water-tight surface which can be turned into an STL and 3D printed The best 3D printer probably uses a stereolithography process. The…

> I don't think they'll let you dose yourself with that many X-Rays for fun. There are companies that will let you get a "baseline" CT scan so that you can compare it with a future scan to see if something has changed. I don't think many doctors recommend this for the general public (because of the high radiation dose), but it does seem to be an available service and not prohibited by the FDA or something. A CT scan…

It's worth pointing out that CT is extremely sensitive for calcium and hence bone, so that bones could be scanned at a lower Xray dose than soft tissue. 30 seconds of Googling showed a study where a whole body CT bone survey was carried out using 4.1 mSv, or about 200 chest xrays. If you're not looking for fine detail in the bones, an even lower dose might suffice.

Re: Ask HN: How can I 3D print my skeleton for research?

#44
post #3

Simply remove your skeleton from its packaging and place it in a 3D scanner. Seriously, where it gets tricky is that there is a lot of stuff (cartilage) in the gray area between bone and flesh. It shows up dimly in CT scans or other X-ray based imaging. If you omit all of it, the skeleton will seem disjointed. If you include all of it, it'll seem fused together. BTW, you can buy actual human skeletons for around $5k.…

Thanks for the insight! Although there are readily available skeletons for purchase, I want to print my own skeleton for "profiling and debugging" purposes :)

Honestly as far as debugging your own skeleton goes I'd skip the 3D print part cause (1) its expensive and (2) you wanna minimise the number of steps between your skeleton and the product you use to debug.

Every one of the steps introduces heaps of error, there's error in the imaging resolution and voxeling, tooons of error in the segmentation process - no matter how good you are at it and a good full-body segmentation can take thousands of hours even by a team of anatomists, and then 3D printing with a commercial printer would introduce even more error.

I'd say a well-segmented digital model of your skeleton would be more than enough to figure out obvious issues :)

Re: Ask HN: How can I 3D print my skeleton for research?

#45
post #7

If you get an mri or ct scan you can use this package to segment the bones and the convert the image slices to 3D geometry. https://www.gibboncode.org/ It’s open source, but uses matlab which is not free if you are not at a university. It will also take a while...

Could you substitute in octave for matlab? Or does it use something in matlab that is not available in octave?

Re: Ask HN: How can I 3D print my skeleton for research?

#46
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like you would want to edit in Blender, or some type of 3d modeling software, and, with an anatomy textbook in hand, edit out the parts that are obviously not bone.

That sounds labor-intensive and error-prone, but it's probably still the best way to end up with an accurate result.

It's the only way to do it. (source, i do 3d tissue reconstructions sometimes)

Re: Ask HN: How can I 3D print my skeleton for research?

#47
post #42

I've done quite a bit of 3D modeling using medical imaging working with various MDs for exploratory research projects. For contrast, you'll want a CT because MRI typically isn't great for bone features but that inherently has radiation exposure which I doubt you'll have an MD sign off on if you're perfectly healthy. I don't recommend this personally but... Ignoring that, most all radiology/medical imaging, especially…

Thank you so much for your insightful comment, I was looking for a tool like 3D Slicer when I got my brain scanned last year.

I managed to spin a few gifs [1] out of the data but got stuck in the 3D-part.

Looking forward to finally trying it out! :)

[1](https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/80vkr6/m...)

Re: Ask HN: How can I 3D print my skeleton for research?

#48
post #42

I've done quite a bit of 3D modeling using medical imaging working with various MDs for exploratory research projects. For contrast, you'll want a CT because MRI typically isn't great for bone features but that inherently has radiation exposure which I doubt you'll have an MD sign off on if you're perfectly healthy. I don't recommend this personally but... Ignoring that, most all radiology/medical imaging, especially…

Thank you so much for your insightful comment, I was looking for a tool like 3D Slicer when I got my brain scanned last year. I managed to spin a few gifs [1] out of the data but got stuck in the 3D-part. Looking forward to finally trying it out! :) [1]( https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/80vkr6/m... )

3D Slicer provides a wealth of training tutorials though sometimes there are slight UI variations between versions that aren't covered that you need to interpret for: https://www.slicer.org/wiki/Documentation/Nightly/Training

Here are some of the generic renderings for the spinal modeling project I described, if you're interested (renderings created with Avizo--an expensive commercial application--instead of 3D slicer for specific use case reasons for the sake time savings): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dkDVeyLLmFM&list=PLZMGw4TBzq...

Re: Ask HN: How can I 3D print my skeleton for research?

#49

So CT would be the best way to get a clearer picture of your own skeleton as high-density structures like bones stand out much better (Hounsfield units and all that). Then you'd have to segment the skeletal system and do a surface-extraction. I have a decent writeup on how to do that with Python and VTK under [1]. MRI might cut it, and unlike CT its not as radioactive, but typically in MR the contrast between soft ti…

Thank you for the detailed response! [2] was an interesting read for someone new to medical imaging.

As you mentioned, it seems like it will be hard to get a referral for a full-body CT scan as a healthy person. The costs of scans also look pretty steep to quench a curiosity thirst :/

Nevertheless, I appreciate you sharing this knowledge and will try to print a segmented skull to understand the process better.

Re: Ask HN: How can I 3D print my skeleton for research?

#50
post #42

I've done quite a bit of 3D modeling using medical imaging working with various MDs for exploratory research projects. For contrast, you'll want a CT because MRI typically isn't great for bone features but that inherently has radiation exposure which I doubt you'll have an MD sign off on if you're perfectly healthy. I don't recommend this personally but... Ignoring that, most all radiology/medical imaging, especially…

Thanks for taking the time to write this!

As you mentioned, it looks like it will be difficult to get a referral for a full-body scan as a healthy person :\

Nonetheless, I found your explanation on printing such objects really helpful and the tutorials for 3D Slicer you've linked are really cool. While fully body scan looks impossible, I was involved in an accident several years ago and the hospital had taken CT scans of my brain to ensure it wasn't damaged. I will visit them to check if they can share the DICOM data of that scan (if they even have it by now) and will try to process it with 3D Slicer.

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