Evaluation of Three-Dimensional Printed Materials for Simulation by Computed Tomography and Ultrasound Imaging

Mooney, James J.; Sarwani, Nabeel; Coleman, Melissa L.; Fotos, Joseph S.

doi:10.1097/sih.0000000000000217

Cited by 19 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…It has been difficult to identify materials suitable for all imaging modalities. However, this new field has great potential to achieve more versatile phantoms …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Recent advances on the development of phantoms using 3D printing for imaging with CT, MRI, PET, SPECT, and ultrasound

2018

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Purpose: Printing technology, capable of producing three-dimensional (3D) objects, has evolved in recent years and provides potential for developing reproducible and sophisticated physical phantoms. 3D printing technology can help rapidly develop relatively low cost phantoms with appropriate complexities, which are useful in imaging or dosimetry measurements. The need for more realistic phantoms is emerging since imaging systems are now capable of acquiring multimodal and multiparametric data. This review addresses three main questions about the 3D printers currently in use, and their produced materials. The first question investigates whether the resolution of 3D printers is sufficient for existing imaging technologies. The second question explores if the materials of 3D-printed phantoms can produce realistic images representing various tissues and organs as taken by different imaging modalities such as computer tomography (CT), positron emission tomography (PET), single-photon emission computed tomography (SPECT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), ultrasound (US), and mammography. The emergence of multimodal imaging increases the need for phantoms that can be scanned using different imaging modalities. The third question probes the feasibility and easiness of "printing" radioactive or nonradioactive solutions during the printing process. Methods: A systematic review of medical imaging studies published after January 2013 is performed using strict inclusion criteria. The databases used were Scopus and Web of Knowledge with specific search terms. In total, 139 papers were identified; however, only 50 were classified as relevant for this paper. In this review, following an appropriate introduction and literature research strategy, all 50 articles are presented in detail. A summary of tables and example figures of the most recent advances in 3D printing for the purposes of phantoms across different imaging modalities are provided. Results: All 50 studies printed and scanned phantoms in either CT, PET, SPECT, mammography, MRI, and US-or a combination of those modalities. According to the literature, different parameters were evaluated depending on the imaging modality used. Almost all papers evaluated more than two parameters, with the most common being Hounsfield units, density, attenuation and speed of sound. Conclusions: The development of this field is rapidly evolving and becoming more refined. There is potential to reach the ultimate goal of using 3D phantoms to get feedback on imaging scanners and reconstruction algorithms more regularly. Although the development of imaging phantoms is evident, there are still some limitations to address: One of which is printing accuracy, due to the printer properties. Another limitation is the materials available to print: There are not enough materials to mimic all the tissue properties. For example, one material can mimic one property-such as the density of real tissue-but not any other property, like speed of sound or attenuation.

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“…It has been difficult to identify materials suitable for all imaging modalities. However, this new field has great potential to achieve more versatile phantoms …”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, this new field has great potential to achieve more versatile phantoms. 10,[16][17][18][19][20][21]24,32,42,52,59,69,72,75,76,80…”

Section: B Characterization Of Phantom Imaging Valuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent advances on the development of phantoms using 3D printing for imaging with CT, MRI, PET, SPECT, and ultrasound

2018

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“…[23] While many of the materials we scanned lie at the extremes of biologic tissue CT numbers, similar to previous studies, some would be useful in creating CT phantoms or procedural simulators. [10,11,13,21] Additionally, for simulators, one needs to take the physical properties of the printed or castable material into consideration. We attempted to provide this information in terms of the Shore scale, a standardized method of measuring the softness/firmness of materials.…”

Section: Ct Number and Physical Propertiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…[10] There have been 3 more recent publications with 14, 9, and 7 materials described using a variety of different printing technologies. [11][12][13] What are more common in the available literature are papers that describe a limited range of printable or bespoke materials evaluated by a range of cross-sectional imaging modalities often using differing scan parameters. [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] A review article by Filippou et al is a nice synthesis of many of these papers and how these materials have been used in the 3D printing and radiology literature.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Simulating Tissues with 3D-Printed and Castable Materials

et al. 2020

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Manufacturing technologies continue to be developed and utilized in medical prototyping, simulations, and imaging phantom production. For radiologic image-guided simulation and instruction, models should ideally have similar imaging characteristics and physical properties to the tissues they replicate. Due to the proliferation of different printing technologies and materials, there is a diverse and broad range of approaches and materials to consider before embarking on a project. Although many printed materials' biomechanical parameters have been reported, no manufacturer includes medical imaging properties that are essential for realistic phantom production. We hypothesize that there are now ample materials available to create high-fidelity imaging anthropomorphic phantoms using 3D printing and casting of common commercially available materials. A material database of radiological, physical, manufacturing, and economic properties for 29 castable and 68 printable materials was generated from samples fabricated by the authors or obtained from the manufacturer and scanned with CT at multiple tube voltages. This is the largest study assessing multiple different parameters associated with 3D printing to date. These data are being made freely available on GitHub, thus affording medical simulation experts access to a database of relevant imaging characteristics of common printable and castable materials. Full data available at: https://github.com/nmcross/Material-Imaging-Characteristics.

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“…Moreover, also some open source applications have been developed for 3D reconstruction, such as 3D Slicer [1], MITK [30], DeVide [35], Invesalius 3 [25]. Among them, the most important tools are Osirix and 3D Slicer that can be used for diagnosis [14,16,22,44], surgery [7,16,32,41] and 3D reconstruction of organs for 3D printing and medical evaluation [18,31].…”

Section: D Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

3D interactive environment for the design of medical devices

Colombo

Rizzi

Regazzoni

et al. 2018

Int J Interact Des Manuf

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The effectiveness of custom-made prostheses or orthoses heavily depends on the experience and skills of the personnel involved in their production. For complex devices, such as lower limb prosthesis, a conventional manual approach affects the process at the point that the result is frequently not acceptable at the first trial. The paper presents a computer-aided environment, named socket modelling assistant 2 (i.e., SMA 2 ), to interactively design the socket of lower limb prosthesis by implementing a set of design rules extrapolated from the traditional development process. The new computer-aided environment has been implemented embracing a low-cost philosophy and using open source libraries to provide a solution affordable also by small orthopaedic laboratories. The system permits to modify and interact with the 3D model of residual limb to create the socket geometric model ready to be manufactured by means of additive manufacturing. SMA 2 embeds medical knowledge related to the device functioning, the conventional process and the way orthopaedic technicians work so that it can be much more reliable and repeatable compared to the conventional process, but still enough similar to it to be accepted by the involved personnel. In the paper, the new 3D design procedure is described in detail, from the acquisition of patient's data to preliminary and customized modelling, and new geometric tools to perform context-related operations are shown. A case study is used to clarify the way the system works and to provide an example of the outcome.

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Evaluation of Three-Dimensional Printed Materials for Simulation by Computed Tomography and Ultrasound Imaging

Cited by 19 publications

References 7 publications

Recent advances on the development of phantoms using 3D printing for imaging with CT, MRI, PET, SPECT, and ultrasound

Recent advances on the development of phantoms using 3D printing for imaging with CT, MRI, PET, SPECT, and ultrasound

Simulating Tissues with 3D-Printed and Castable Materials

3D interactive environment for the design of medical devices

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