A Semi-automatic Cranial Implant Design Tool Based on Rigid ICP Template Alignment and Voxel Space Reconstruction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a semi-automatic cranial implant design tool that simplifies the creation of patient-specific implants using template alignment and voxel reconstruction, aiming to improve efficiency and accessibility in cranioplasty.

Contribution

The authors developed a GUI-based prototype for semi-automatic cranial implant design, incorporating improved alignment methods and voxel space reconstruction, with open-source availability.

Findings

Enhanced alignment accuracy near defect borders

Reduced manual intervention in implant design

Open-source software for cranial implant creation

Abstract

In traumatic medical emergencies, the patients heavily depend on cranioplasty - the craft of neurocranial repair using cranial implants. Despite the improvements made in recent years, the design of a patient-specific implant (PSI) is among the most complex, expensive, and least automated tasks in cranioplasty. Further research in this area is needed. Therefore, we created a prototype application with a graphical user interface (UI) specifically tailored for semi-automatic implant generation, where the users only need to perform high-level actions. A general outline of the proposed implant generation process involves setting an area of interest, aligning the templates, and then creating the implant in voxel space. Furthermore, we show that the alignment can be improved significantly, by only considering clipped geometry in the vicinity of the defect border. The software prototype will be open-sourced at https://github.com/3Descape/Cranial_Implant_Design