3D Brain Model Can Give Health Insights in The Palm of Your Hand

A new 3D brain model printing technique allows for faster, better, and more cost-effective models of patient-targeted clinical knowledge for study and diagnosis.

Consider the possibility that you could keep up your very own physical brain model in your palms, which is exactly accurate to every fold.

This was true for Steven Keating, Ph.D., who had a baseball-sized tumor expelled from his cerebrum at age 26 while he was a graduate student in the MIT Media Lab’s Mediated group.

Inquisitive to look at how his mind functioned when the tumor was expelled, and with the objective of translating his diagnosis and pharmaceutical alternatives, Keating accumulated his clinical information and began 3D printing his MRI and CT scans, yet was disappointed that present methodologies had been tedious, lumbering, and neglected to unveil vital components of value.

3D Printing for the Body

Keating at that point related to his group’s teammates, including those from the Wyss Institute at Harvard College, who have been investigating another procedure of 3D printing some biological samples.

A member of the group said that they didn’t know how to utilize their innovation in human life systems until Keating came to them and gave them information.

The result of this cooperation offered another method that enables images from MRI, CT, and many medical scans to be easily and quickly adjusted into body parts with unmistakable components.

One of the associates commented that this makes focused 3D-printed clinical models with a small amount of the work required than the past, accordingly, making 3D printing more open to the clinical field as a gadget for research and analysis.

Imaging tests like MRI and CT scans deliver high-precision pictures as a progression of cuts that reveal the fundamental structures inside the human body.

Thus, they are an invaluable resource for evaluating and diagnosing scientific theories.

3D Printing and Medical Imaging

Most 3D printers construct physical things in a layer-by layer framework, so feeding them layers of medical pictures to make an unrivaled structure is a conspicuous collaboration between the two connected sciences.

In any case, there is a problem: MRI and CT scans create pictures with so much components that the article of interest should be separated from surrounding tissue and changed into networks keeping in mind the end goal to be printed.

This is executed through a very time-consuming method known as segmentation, in which a radiologist manually traces the desired object on each single image slice, which usually contains hundreds of images in a single sample, or an automated thresholding process wherein a computer quickly converts areas that incorporate grayscale pixels into either stable black or stable white pixels, centered on a shade of grey that is chosen to be the threshold between black and white.

In any case, therapeutic imaging consolidates objects which are sporadically formed and needs clear, all around borders; in this way, auto-thresholding or even manual division overstates the measurements of a feature washes out important details.

The new process described by the authors offers clinical specialists a speedy and highly accurate procedure for converting difficult pictures into a format that can be 3D printed easily.

The key lies in printing with dithered bitmaps, a computerized document design in which every pixel of a grayscale picture is changed over into a progression of high contrast pixels, and the thickness of the dark pixels is the thing that characterizes the uncommon shades of gray as opposed to the pixels themselves in different hues.

The scientists trust that their approach will help make 3D printing a more practical tool for tests and judgments, patient instruction, and investigation of the human body.