[Guidance Needed] 3D Printed Bone Graft for Jaw and Teeth reconstruction - IRL

[piotroxp]

Hello SOFA devs

I had a benign but destructive cancer in my jaw. It took 4 teeth, and the surgery paralyzed my nerve. However, along with a team of doctors we are aiming at using 3D printing to reconstruct what I'm missing.

Is there a general guide to performing a medical simulation that would be based on a CAT scan model? The idea is to create a composite simulation with the 3D printed part being tucked in the bone that I have left.

What I need is a general intro into:

1. loading meshes of different types (ie titanium/bone/ceramics in one go)
2. mechanical and thermal simulation (i smoke cigarettes, so the new teeth cannot kill any tissue by high thermal conductivity)
3. ability to perform optimization of the design

I realize this is a huge question. Since I learned about Sofa only today, I will gladly take some information in, and if possible, would be willing to contribute new plugins during the fight to get my jaw back to full reconstruction.

Since it will be possible to use many types of 3D prints, the simulations will be tested in experiment.

Can someone please let me know as to how do I start? Its obvious Im going through the general readme, what I need is the "a-ha" moments now so that this can happen soon. Great help will be greatly appreciated, and when the time is right, rewarded.

[hugtalbot]

Hey @piotroxp

Thanks for sharing your personal experience. After fighting cancer, it's a nice challenge to create patient-specific 3D printed prosthesis. It's already nice to see that you understand how deep is the question.

We do not have a ready-to-use tutorial to run a medical simulation based on CAT scans. However, I would detail the steps as follows:

• loading and segmenting the medical image in a segmentation tool (e.g. itksnap or medinria)
• from the surface mesh, creating volumetric meshes using mesh tools like CGAL
• building your physics simulation ➡️ my question here would be, what do you want to model? what is the data of interest to build the prosthesis?
• exploiting the simulation results

About how to build a simulation, we do regularly propose training sessions. If you are looking at collaborating with partners from the community do not hesitate. InfinyTech3D or Anatoscope could be some good fit depending on the level of subcontracting you would be looking for. For any further question on this two aspects, do not hesitate to contact us in PM [email protected]

Best.