Ask HN: How can I 3D print my skeleton for research? • Hacker News Board

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

#51

Post by zubairq » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 6:27 AM UTC

magic_beans wrote: post #13

zubairq wrote: post #4

Wow this would be a great thing to try to fix body faults

How, exactly?

Well, with physiotherapy and osteopathy which are used to fix body and movement faults one of the biggest problems is knowing exactly how the bones and cartilage are aligned. Currently most techniques for finding this involve another person prodding and poking the patient's body, so to have a #d map would be hugely useful

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

#52

Post by PlaceboGazebo » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 12:17 PM UTC

hughes wrote: post #41

PlaceboGazebo wrote: post #17

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!

Mine lives on my Google drive, so no worries there!

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

#53

Post by amjaeger » Fri, Apr 05, 2019, 7:47 PM UTC

cr0sh wrote: post #45

amjaeger wrote: 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?

Octave looks really cool, I am not familiar with it. Like I said, gibbon is open source, so you could attempt to port it. I didn't write gibbon, so I have no idea what the dependencies are like. But I imagine it would not be trivial.