Fraunhofer Institute for Computer Graphics Research IGD, Darmstadt, Germany.
Department of Computer Science, Technical University Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany.
Nat Commun. 2024 Feb 27;15(1):1360. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-45345-5.
Millions of people require custom ocular prostheses due to eye loss or congenital defects. The current fully manual manufacturing processes used by highly skilled ocularists are time-consuming with varying quality. Additive manufacturing technology has the potential to simplify the manufacture of ocular prosthetics, but existing approaches just replace to various degrees craftsmanship by manual digital design and still require substantial expertise and time. Here we present an automatic digital end-to-end process for producing custom ocular prostheses that uses image data from an anterior segment optical coherence tomography device and considers both shape and appearance. Our approach uses a statistical shape model to predict, based on incomplete surface information of the eye socket, a best fitting prosthesis shape. We use a colour characterized image of the healthy fellow eye to determine and procedurally generate the prosthesis's appearance that matches the fellow eye. The prosthesis is manufactured using a multi-material full-colour 3D printer and postprocessed to satisfy regulatory compliance. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by presenting results for 10 clinic patients who received a 3D printed prosthesis. Compared to a current manual process, our approach requires five times less labour of the ocularist and produces reproducible output.
由于眼部丧失或先天缺陷，数百万人需要定制眼部假肢。目前，由高技能的义眼技师使用的完全手动制造工艺既耗时又质量不一。增材制造技术有可能简化眼部假肢的制造，但现有的方法只是在不同程度上用手动数字设计来代替工艺，仍然需要大量的专业知识和时间。在这里，我们提出了一种用于生产定制眼部假肢的自动数字端到端流程，该流程使用来自前段光学相干断层扫描设备的图像数据，并同时考虑形状和外观。我们的方法使用统计形状模型，根据眼窝的不完整表面信息来预测最佳拟合的假肢形状。我们使用健康对侧眼睛的特征颜色图像来确定并按程序生成与对侧眼睛相匹配的假肢外观。假肢使用多材料全彩色 3D 打印机制造，并进行后处理以满足监管要求。我们通过展示 10 名接受 3D 打印假肢的诊所患者的结果来证明我们方法的有效性。与当前的手动工艺相比，我们的方法减少了五倍的义眼师劳动量，并产生可重复的结果。
