An innovative strategy for the identification and 3D reconstruction of pancreatic cancer from CT images.

We propose an innovative tool for Pancreatic Ductal AdenoCarcinoma 3D reconstruction from Multi-Detector-Computed Tomography. The tumor mass is discriminated from health tissue, and the resulting segmentation labels are rendered preserving information on different hypodensity levels. The final 3D virtual model includes also pancreas and main peri-pancreatic vessels, and it is suitable for 3D printing. We performed a preliminary evaluation of the tool effectiveness presenting ten cases of Pancreatic Ductal AdenoCarcinoma processed with the tool to an expert radiologist who can correct the result of the discrimination. In seven of ten cases, the 3D reconstruction is accepted without any modification, while in three cases, only 1.88, 5.13, and 5.70 %, respectively, of the segmentation labels are modified, preliminary proving the high effectiveness of the tool.