HOWTO turn an MRI of a crocodile skull into a 3D printed replica

Gian Pablo wanted to turn an MRI of a crocodile skull into a 3D model and print it out on a Makerbot 3D printer; the process was complex, but produced a very good result; Pablo's documented the process so you can repeat it and improve on it:

The crocodile skull data is derived from a CT scan of a real skull. It is very detailed, preserving information about the internal volumes of the skull. That makes it fragile. I quickly realized that I was going to have to slice it into two parts in order to be able to print it without support. Cutting support off a fragile piece can be very difficult!
The first step is optional: the model is very high resolution, more than will really be noticeable in the print. If you want, open the model in Meshlab, and use Quadratic Decimation to reduce the number of polygons to 50% or 25% of the original number. This will make things faster. However, I had no issues slicing the model in Skeinforge at full resolution, though it took longer.
The next step is to get it into the right orientation. You can do this in ReplicatorG, which works fine, but since I was going to use Netfabb Studio for the rest of the process, I just used that.

Printing complex organic shapes with a Makerbot « MakerBot Industries

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jtegnell

I bet this could be used to make replicas of fossils still in matrix.
Crackermack

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Anonymous

A CT scan is not an MRI. MRIs utilize a stationary scanner utilizing magnetic resonance for imaging, while CT scanners utilizes a mobile table with an X-ray scanning ring to image an object in slices, and then uses a computer to composite those slices into a navagable 3D image.

CT is also much better for bone imaging than MRI, generally speaking.
CastanhasDoPara

That’s actually a really neat application of this technology. There are so many things I could do with this if money wasn’t an object.
Anonymous

the technique has already been used in forensics, where reverse engineering gives you the possiblity of presenting bone damage as evidence in court (location, numbers, succession of blows) but spare the family of the “old school” way to do this (which is – sever the head, remove the soft tissue and bury the skull after trial).
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed?term=kettner%20potente
gpvillamil

Yeah, I wrote the original article and it is a CT scan, as it says in my text. I’ll ask Cory to change the title to reflect that.

Digimorph at UT is a cool project – worth checking out.
jon_anon

Not an MRI, but a CT scan (Computed tomography, what used to be called a CAT scan). Presumably you could do the same with an MRI, but MRI is more suited to soft tissues than bone.
someToast

Resizing half-meg images in HTML makes baby Jebus cry.