Computer-aided implant design for the restoration of cranial defects

Abstract Patient-specific cranial implants are important and necessary in the surgery of cranial defect restoration. However, traditional methods of manual design of cranial implants are complicated and time-consuming. Our purpose is to develop a novel software named EasyCrania to design the cranial...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Xiaojun Chen, Lu Xu, Xing Li, Jan Egger
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Nature Publishing Group 2017-06-01
Series:Scientific Reports
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-04454-6
Description
Summary:Abstract Patient-specific cranial implants are important and necessary in the surgery of cranial defect restoration. However, traditional methods of manual design of cranial implants are complicated and time-consuming. Our purpose is to develop a novel software named EasyCrania to design the cranial implants conveniently and efficiently. The process can be divided into five steps, which are mirroring model, clipping surface, surface fitting, the generation of the initial implant and the generation of the final implant. The main concept of our method is to use the geometry information of the mirrored model as the base to generate the final implant. The comparative studies demonstrated that the EasyCrania can improve the efficiency of cranial implant design significantly. And, the intra- and inter-rater reliability of the software were stable, which were 87.07 ± 1.6% and 87.73 ± 1.4% respectively.
ISSN:2045-2322