Software tool for cranial orthosis design

Abstract

Cranial orthoses are used to correct an abnormal children head shape, and such they have to be designed individually. Customization of those orthoses is currently fully manual task. A software tool should make this process semi-automatic with only small intervention from the user and speed up the whole process. In the future, this tool will be part of the process chain from 3D scanning of the patient head to the 3D printing of the final product. This will allow to produce the orthosis anywhere, without necessity to have expensive devices on one place. For high quality of 3D printing, 3D computer models with high-resolution meshes must be used. We have started development of our tool by rapid testing of methodology. For this purpose we used open source software Blender. Although Blender’s functions we used are more robust, they are also unnecessary computationally more expensive. For this reason we have implemented the necessary transformation functions using radial basis functions (RBF) which can be easily modified to include rigid body movements.