On 3D Printing and Opening up of Healthcare Sector (And my tiny contribution to the same)
The world of open source is quite fascinating and has in it almost everything you will ever need. In fact open source, I find is increasingly the preferred choice of software not only in the academia but also in the industry as well. The thing about open source projects is that they have become synonymous with software for most parts, often related to fulfil some programmer problems. But the truth is far from it. Now there are projects related to end use applications such as mechanical design, chemical analysis and electronics. The open source hardware systems, such as Arduino and Reprap are in their developmental stages right now and have been received very positively by the people.
So how does 3D printing connect with healthcare? The idea is that healthcare has been one of the more neglected branches as far as dedicated development for a sector is concerned. One of the major reasons has been an almost hegemonic control by multinational companies in the sector backed by patents and the technical know-how, apart from the financial muscle, of course. Opening up the healthcare sector promises to revolutionize healthcare, especially in the third world countries where medical equipment and software is rather difficult to come by and doctors have to rely on their experience to be able to heal the patients.
In my opinion, governments should work together with the academia in the R&D dedicated towards development of cheaper and better healthcare related technologies and open-source them for the world to benefit from the same and contribute to them. This is exactly what was done by the Brazilian government's Center for Information Technology Renato Archer - CTI whose mission is to "conducts research and development in many strategic areas, such as micro and nano electronics, systems, software and IT applications, e.g. robotics, decision support systems and 3D technologies for industry and medicine. With strong interaction with universities, research centers and industry, CTI has been able to act as a key agent in the Brazilian R&D system."
One of their best contributions to the open source world and the healthcare R&D community is the Invesalius project, which is a software for viewing, editing and manipulation of DICOM image data in both 2D and 3D. Quoted from the site: InVesalius is a medical public software which aims to assist diagnosis and surgical planning. Based on a sequence of two dimensional (2D) images, acquired through computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance (MRI) equipments, InVesalius allows the reconstruction of virtual three dimensional (3D) models, correspondent to the anatomical region of interest. The software has shown to be versatile, contributing with various fields, among which medicine, odontology, veterinary, archeology and engineering.
The software also enables you to export your 3D reconstructions in file formats which can be (with suitable post processing) can be 3D printed directly. Now mind you the post processing part is harder than it sounds since there are a number of artifacts you will need to eliminate to get to a water-tight mesh. This can be used for medical diagnosis, visualization of internal structures in the form of 3D models, vanity/educational purposes (such as printing out a model of an unborn foetus) and also for artistic creations.
I have used the software extensively and apart from the few glitches of crashing (which was more due to the lack of a GPU on my computer), it works beautifully. The image reconstruction is almost perfect and you have access to an array of a variety of reconstruction algorithms such as Maximum Intensity Projections (MIPs), minimal intensity projections etc which will enable you to identify the body parts you want to visualize in 3D. In fact, I have recently finished an exciting pet project which I shall share soon using Invesalius.
However one of the problems that I and most other people have faced has been a lack of English documentation of the user manual. The user manual of the software is in Portuguese and it is rather tough for non-native speakers to understand and utilize the software to its fullest without an English translation. I therefore took it upon myself to make a small contribution by translating the entire manual into English with some help from Google Translate, a few image extractor software from PDFs and a few cups of tea :) So here goes: English Translation of Invesalius Manual. You are free to comment on the PDF to point out the places which need correction.
Kindly note that this is not a perfect translation. There are a few places where I was not sure what the words could be so I left them as is. It will be nice of you to point out the same in the PDF. If you can help me out in the editing of the manual, kindly drop me a mail at angrishatin (at) google's public email service and I shall send a word doc file of the manual!
