Biomodelling Methods Employed to Reconstruct Three Dimension Anatomically Accurate Substructures of the Human Cardiac Anatomy

Biomodeling is an important method to analyse the human anatomy. A spatially accurate three dimensional (3D) biomodel recreated from a computed tomography (CT) scans allow for various extended use. One major use would be as an instructional kit to train junior surgeons because of its exact replica of the actual anatomy in positions relative to each other. The approach has been extensively pursued by the primary author with neuro-, maxillofacial and otolaryngology surgeons. In the field of cardiothoracic surgery, the utility of biomodels is further emphasised because the cadaveric heart collapses post mortem thus making it ineffective to be used to train surgical residents to identify the sub-structures of cardiac anatomy. A gated and contrasted CT scan of the second author was performed. This paper discusses the 3D image processing and modelling methods and suggests the combined use of B-spline algorithm to reproduce aortic sub-structures from CT scans. Comparisons and methods to make a biomodel suitable to be 3D printed on a rapid prototyping apparatus are elucidated. Effort is currently underway to utilise the presented method to recreate a spatially accurate and complete structure of the human cardiac biomodel.