Harvard’s Wyss Institute and MIT Media Lab have partnered together to create a way of crunching imaging data from different sources and modalities into a uniform computer file type called “dithered bitmaps”. After conversion, the images can be easily used to 3D print models of organs and other body parts, for example. This is compared to how technicians have to spend a lot of time converting and touching up 3D data before it can be printed into an actual object that will stay together and look like the thing that it’s mimicking.
Images: Top: The 291,362 colored line segments in this 3D-printed model of a human brain represent bundles of axons that connect different regions of the brain, color-coded based on their orientation in 3D space. Bottom: A 3D-printed model of the protein crystal structure of Apolipoprotein A-I, a dataset containing 6,588 points for each atom and 13,392 line segments for each interatomic bond.
Study in journal 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing: From Improved Diagnostics to Presurgical Planning: High-Resolution Functionally Graded Multimaterial 3D Printing of Biomedical Tomographic Data Sets…
Via: Wyss Institute…