Surface reconstruction for generating digital models of prosthesis

Abstract

The restoration and recovery of a defective skull can be performed through operative techniques to implant a customized prosthesis. Recently, image processing and surface reconstruction methods have been used for digital prosthesis design. In this paper we present a framework for prosthesis modeling. Firstly, we take the computed tomography (CT) of the skull and perform bone segmentation by thresholding. The obtained binary volume is processed by morphological operators, frame-by-frame, to get the inner and outer boundaries of the bone. These curves are used to initialize a 2D deformable model that generates the prosthesis boundary in each CT frame. In this way, we can fill the prosthesis volume which is the input for a marching cubes technique that computes the digital model of the target geometry. In the experimental results we demonstrate the potential of our technique and compare it with a related one.