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A team of University of baby直播app researchers has developed a new strategy for transforming medical images, such as CT or MRI scans, into incredibly detailed 3D models on the computer. The advance marks an important step toward printing lifelike representations of human anatomy that medical professionals can squish, poke and prod in the real world.

The researchers describe their results in a paper in the journal 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing.

The discovery stems from a collaboration between scientists at CU Boulder and CU Anschutz Medical Campus designed to address a major need in the medical world: Surgeons have long used imaging tools to plan out their procedures before stepping into the operating room. But you can鈥檛 touch an MRI scan, said Robert MacCurdy, assistant professor in the at CU Boulder.

His team wants to fix that, giving doctors a new way to print realistic, and graspable, models of their patients鈥� various body parts, down to the detail of their tiny blood vessels鈥攊n other words, a听model of your very own kidney entirely fabricated from soft and pliable polymers.

鈥淥ur method addresses the critical need to provide surgeons and patients with a greater understanding of patient-specific anatomy before the surgery ever takes place,鈥� said MacCurdy, senior author of the new paper.

The latest study gets the team closer to achieving that goal. In it, MacCurdy and his colleagues lay out a method for using scan data to develop maps of organs made up of billions of volumetric pixels, or 鈥渧oxels鈥濃�攍ike the pixels that make up a digital photograph, only three-dimensional.听听

The researchers are currently experimenting with how they can use 3D printers to turn those maps into physical models that are more accurate than those available through existing tools.

The project, which is led by MacCurdy and CU Anschutz鈥� Nicholas Jacobson, is funded by , a grant program that seeks to spur new collaborations between the two baby直播app campuses.

"In my lab we look for alternative ways of representation that will feed, rather than interrupt, the thinking process of surgeons," said Jacobson, a clinical design researcher at the . "These representations become sources of ideas that help us and our surgical collaborators see听and react to听more of what is in the available data."

Slicing the orange

Human organs are complicated鈥攎ade up of networks of tissue, blood vessels, nerves and more, all with their own texture and colors.听

Currently, medical professionals try to capture these structures using 鈥渂oundary surface鈥� mapping, which, essentially, represents an object as a series of surfaces.

鈥淭hink of existing methods as representing an entire orange by only considering the exterior orange peel,鈥� MacCurdy said. 鈥淲hen viewed that way, the entire orange is peel.鈥�

His team鈥檚 method, in contrast, is all juicy insides.

The approach begins with a Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) file, the standard听3D data that CT and MRI scans produce. Using custom software, MacCurdy and his colleagues convert that information into voxels, essentially slicing an organ into tiny cubes with a volume much smaller than a typical tear drop.听

And, MacCurdy said, the group can do all that without losing any information about the organs in the process鈥攕omething that鈥檚 impossible with existing mapping methods.

To test these tools, the team took real scan data of a human heart, kidney and brain, then created a map for each of those structures. The resulting maps were detailed enough that they could, for example, distinguish between the kidney鈥檚 fleshy interior, or medulla, and its outer layer or, cortex鈥攂oth of which look pink to the human eye.听

鈥淪urgeons are constantly touching and interacting with tissues,鈥� MacCurdy said,听鈥淪o we want to give them models that are both visual and tactile and as representative of what they're going to face as they can be.鈥�