부산대학교 도서관

Patients with advanced cancer undergoing chest wall resection may require reconstruction. Currently, rib prostheses are created by segmenting computed tomography images, which is time-consuming and labour intensive. The aim was to optimise the production of digital rib models based on a patient's age, weight, height and gender. A statistical shape model of human ribs was created and used to synthetise rib models, which were compared to the ones produced by segmentation and mirroring. The segmentation took $11.56\pm 1.60$ min compared to $0.027 \pm 0.009\ \min$ using the new technique. The average mesh error between the mirroring technique and segmentation was $0.58\pm 0.25$ mm (right ribs), and $0.87\pm 0.18$ mm (left ribs), compared to $1.37\pm 0.66$ mm ($\mathrm{p} < 0.0001$) and 1.68 $\pm 0.77$ mm ($\mathrm{p} < 0.05$), respectively, for the new technique. The new technique is promising for the efficiency and ease-of-use in the clinical environment. Clinical Relevance— This is an optimised 3D modelling method providing clinicians with a time-efficient technique to create patient-specific rib prostheses, without any expertise or software knowledge required.