Stereolithographic vascular replicas from CT scans: choosing treatment strategies, teaching, and research from live patient scan data.

Our goal was to develop a system that would allow us to recreate live patient arterial pathology by using an industrial technique known as stereolithography (or rapid prototyping). In industry, drawings rendered into dicom files can be exported to a computer programmed to drive various industrial tools. Those tools then make a 3D structure shown by the original drawings. We manipulated CT scan dicom files to drive a stereolithography machine and were able to make replicas of the vascular diseases of three patients.