Elaborazione di immagini Biomediche per la stampa 3D: uno strumento per la pianificazione chirurgica

Complex surgery requires a thorough understanding of the individual clinical case to achieve the best possible outcome of the surgical operation itself. Therefore, its planning is a crucial phase in order to obtain a decrease in the incidence of complications and a reduction in the duration of the intervention. These factors could impact not only intra-operative mortality but also patient recovery in these high-risk surgical operations. Patient-specific modeling could be the adequate solution for this problem because of its potential to improve diagnosis and optimize clinical treatment by predicting complications that could occur during the interventions. Recent publications show the feasibility or preliminary validation studies on modeling technologies, but, before 3D modeling can become standard of care, the workflow involving modeling methods and equations has to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and by similar institutions. The model would have to undergo the same approval procedures as for medical devices.Through the realization of different three-dimensional (3-D) patient-specific models, this work highlights the criticalpoints of the image acquisition and image processing, the importance of the related 3-D printing process as well as its suitability for application in cardiovascular diseases.