3D Boolean operations in virtual surgical planning

Area of Science:

• Computer-aided design (CAD)
• Computational geometry
• Medical imaging and simulation

Background:

• Boolean operations are crucial for virtual surgical planning, enabling accurate modeling of patient and implant interactions.
• Existing methods often struggle with diverse data types like surface meshes and 3D scans, leading to inaccuracies.
• Robust and exact Boolean operations are essential for reliable virtual surgical planning.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce and evaluate a novel method for performing Boolean operations, named BORES (Boolean operations by a robust, exact, and simple method between two colliding shells).
• To compare the performance of BORES against existing Visualization Toolkit (VTK) implementations for Boolean operations.
• To assess the suitability of BORES for virtual surgical planning applications.

Main Methods:

• The study proposes BORES, a robust, exact, and simple method for Boolean operations on colliding shells.
• A comparative analysis was conducted between BORES and the current VTK-based methods.
• Performance was evaluated using various complex geometric configurations and data types.

Main Results:

• BORES successfully handled complex geometric configurations and identified impossible input scenarios.
• In contrast, VTK implementations exhibited instability, failed with singular edges and coplanar collisions, and produced defects.
• BORES demonstrated superior robustness and accuracy compared to VTK.

Conclusions:

• BORES is an efficient, accurate, and simple method for Boolean operations, well-suited for virtual surgical planning.
• The proposed method offers significant advantages over existing VTK implementations in terms of stability and defect handling.
• Future work will focus on extending BORES to manage non-colliding components for broader applicability.