8 research outputs found
Characterization of Commercial and Custom-Made Printing Filament Materials for Computed Tomography Imaging of Radiological Phantoms
No full textIn recent years, material extrusion-based additive manufacturing, particularly fused filament fabrication (FFF), has gained significant attention due to its versatility and cost-effectiveness in producing complex geometries. This paper presents the characterization of seven novel materials for FFF and twenty-two commercially available filaments in terms of X-ray computed tomography (CT) numbers, as tissue mimicking materials for the realization of 3D printed radiological phantoms. Two technical approaches, by 3D printing of cube samples and by producing cylinders of melted materials, are used for achieving this goal. Results showed that the CT numbers, given in Hounsfield unit (HU), of all the samples depended on the beam kilovoltage (kV). The CT numbers ranged from +411 HU to +3071 HU (at 80 kV), from −422 HU to +3071 HU (at 100 kV), and from −442 HU to +3070 HU (at 120 kV). Several commercial and custom-made filaments demonstrated suitability for substituting soft and hard human tissues, for realization of 3D printed phantoms with FFF in CT imaging. For breast imaging, an anthropomorphic phantom with two filaments could be fabricated using ABS-C (conductive acrylonitrile butadiene styrene) as a substitute for breast adipose tissue, and ASA-A (acrylic styrene acrylonitrile) for glandular breast tissue
A novel 3D printing method for accurate anatomy replication in patient‐specific phantoms
No full text
Anthropomorphic Physical Breast Phantom Based on Patient Breast CT Data: Preliminary Results
No full textAssessment of 11 Available Materials With Custom Three-Dimensional-Printing Patterns for the Simulation of Muscle, Fat, and Lung Hounsfield Units in Patient-Specific Phantoms
No full textA couple of fused deposition modeling (FDM) three-dimensional (3D) printers using variable infill density patterns were employed to simulate human muscle, fat, and lung tissue as it is represented by Hounsfield units (HUs) in computer tomography (CT) scans. Eleven different commercial plastic filaments were assessed by measuring their mean HU on CT images of small cubes printed with different patterns. The HU values were proportional to the mean effective density of the cubes. Polylactic acid (PLA) filaments were chosen. They had good printing characteristics and acceptable HU. Such filaments obtained from two different vendors were then tested by printing two sets of cubes comprising 10 and 6 cubes with 100% to 20% and 100% to 50% infill densities, respectively. They were printed with different printing patterns named “Regular” and “Bricks,” respectively. It was found that the HU values measured on the CT images of the 3D-printed cubes were proportional to the infill density with slight differences between vendors and printers. The Regular pattern with infill densities of about 30%, 90%, and 100% were found to produce HUs equivalent to lung, fat, and muscle. This was confirmed with histograms of the respective region of interest (ROI). The assessment of popular 3D-printing materials resulted in the choice of PLA, which together with the proposed technique was found suitable for the adequate simulation of the muscle, fat, and lung HU in printed patient-specific phantoms.</jats:p
Application of 3D Printed Anthropomorphic Phantoms for Research and Educational Purposes in Digital Radiology
No full textPhysical Anthropomorphic Breast Phantoms for X-ray Imaging Techniques: Manufacturing Approach
No full textPatient breast MRI images and computational breast phantom data for research in patient-derived realistic breast modelling
No full textThe data is comprised of two parts: 1) patient DICOM MRI images and 2) 3D matrix of a computational breast phantom.
The DICOM images are anonymised patient breast MRI images of a female patient diagnosed with invasive ductal carcinoma. The obtaining of the patients’ DICOM images is approved by the Ethics Committee of Medical University of Varna. The acquisition was performed with GE Signa HDxt MRI scanner. The images are from a T1-weigthed Axial multi-phase VIBRANT (3-phase) sequence and with voxel size of 0.7 mm x 0.7 mm x 0.8 mm. Contrast agent is present. The image set can be opened with any standard DICOM reader.
The computational breast phantom is derived from the above mentioned dataset. The phantom is in the form of a 3D matrix saved as a MATLAB data file (.mat file). Each voxel has an assigned Hounsfield Unit value depending on its classification: air = 0, adipose tissue = -152, glandular tissue = 42, tumour = 64, skin = 108. The data file can be opened with MATLAB or Octave
