3D Boolean operations in virtual surgical planning

Purpose

Boolean operations in computer-aided design or computer graphics are a set of operations (e.g. intersection, union, subtraction) between two objects (e.g. a patient model and an implant model) that are important in performing accurate and reproducible virtual surgical planning. This requires accurate and robust techniques that can handle various types of data, such as a surface extracted from volumetric data, synthetic models, and 3D scan data.

Methods

This article compares the performance of the proposed method (Boolean operations by a robust, exact, and simple method between two colliding shells (BORES)) and an existing method based on the Visualization Toolkit (VTK).

Results

In all tests presented in this article, BORES could handle complex configurations as well as report impossible configurations of the input. In contrast, the VTK implementations were unstable, do not deal with singular edges and coplanar collisions, and have created several defects.

Conclusions

The proposed method of Boolean operations, BORES, is efficient and appropriate for virtual surgical planning. Moreover, it is simple and easy to implement. In future work, we will extend the proposed method to handle non-colliding components.