Introduction: Developing new surgical procedures and prototyping implants requires a real or adequate virtual testing environment to work in. Due to the unique architecture of the human foot interventions and implants can be tested only on patients and cadavers. We present our own approach for creating the geometrical model based on 3D CT reconstruction.
Material and methods: For the model construction we used the CT data from the foot of a healthy, young patient. The input data consisted from 56 sections from the talar dome to the plantar surface. The slices were segmented, boundary detection was performed, the boundaries were smoothed, NURBS interpolation was performed to obtain 3D surface. The surfaces were closed to solids and the solids edited to obtain the virtual anatomical structures.
Results: Our model is geometrically accurate in the limits of resolution that were given by the CT examination.
Conclusions: Now that we have an available model construction method we can begin enclosing the geometrical model into mathematical environments for finite element analysis. Also, scanning and reconstructing multiple feet with different conditions will help us to understand illnesses and develop new operative techniques and implants.