Cristobal
Arrieta1,2, Sergio Uribe, 2,3, Carlos Sing-Long1,2,
Jorge Ramos4, Alex Vargas5, Pablo Irarrazaval1,2,
Cristian Tejos1,2
1Department
of Electrical Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile,
Santiago, Chile; 2Biomedical Imaging Center, Pontificia
Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago, Chile; 3Department of
Radiology, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile, Santiago, Chile; 4Department
of Mechanical Engineering, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile,
Santiago, Chile; 5Department of Surgery, Pontificia Universidad
Catolica de Chile, Santiago, Chile
Rapid
Prototyping (RP) allows building realistic replicas of biological structures.
The building process consists of acquiring imaging data, segmenting the
structures of interest, triangulating the segmentation and printing. When RPs
of soft tissues are built, segmentation becomes an important issue because of
the low contrast between structures. Therefore, threshold, region-growing or edge-detection
based segmentation tend to fail, making this process extremely tedious as
important human assistance is required. We propose the use of an implicit
Active Contour technique to facilitate the segmentation process. We evaluated
our method by constructing an RP of a pathological heart scanned with a
standard CMR.