Deep learning-based automatic cranial implant design through direct defect shape prediction and its comparison study

Defects to human crania are one kind of head bone damages, and cranial implants can be used to repair the defected crania. The automation of the implant design process is crucial in reducing the corresponding therapy time. Taking the cranial implant design problem as a special kind of shape completion task, an automatic cranial implant design workflow is proposed, which consists of a deep neural network for the direct shape prediction of the missing part of the defective cranium and conventional post-processing steps to refine the automatically generated implant. To evaluate the proposed workflow, we employ cross-validation and report an average Dice Similarity Score and boundary Dice Similarity Score of 0.81 and 0.81, respectively. We also measure the surface distance error using the 95th quantile of the Hausdorff Distance, which yields an average of 3.01 mm. Comparison with the manual cranial implant design procedure also revealed the convenience of the proposed workflow. In addition, a plugin is developed for 3D Slicer, which implements the proposed automatic cranial implant design workflow and can facilitate the end-users.