I am a new member of our community and have a question that I would like to discuss with you.
Does anyone try to build the entire human airway (upper and lower airway) from bronchi to nasal/oral cavity and export as one STL file? I tried using lung CT segmented extension. The lower airway looks very good, but the upper airway. I have a problem with my upper airway that there is leaking area in CT images that made up an issue (please find in picture below). Anyone has done this type of things, please give me suggestion how can I build up the entire human airway?
I am more than happy to listen to you all!
Thank you very much in advance!
For the upper airway, I would recommend that you familiarize yourself with the tools in the Segment Editor module. You should be able to get to what you want with a simple sequence of steps. For example, Threshold to find all air (something like <-250 HU should work), then Islands → Keep selected island and click in trachea. If the upper airway remains connected to the external air (which is likely), break the connections using the Scissors tool or via Paint or Erase, then keep selected island again.
Thank you very much! I am curious if you ever try to export file from Slicer and then import to and CAD software. So far, I see Slicer is just able to convert file into meshing file (STL etc.) but CAD. I would like to edit the file a little bit in Solidworks.
I don’t use any CAD software, and I believe it is quite challenging to go from arbitrary meshes back to mathematical primitives used in CAD. If you search this forum for “CAD”, there are many hits and you may be able to find more information there.
So have you ever edited the 3d model generated from Slicer 3D? how can you do that? For instance, I want to remove certain areas, but the scissors will remove the entire part vertically, so if I remove something on top of other things, it will remove both top and bottom things.
Yes, I frequently edit segmentations using a variety of Segment Editor tools. Then if I need a surface model I export it from the edited segment.
Specifically with the scissors tool, you have a lot of flexibility in how it works:
For example, you could limit the range around the edited slice by selecting the “Symmetric” option and entering the range in which you want edits to occur. If that doesn’t offer fine enough control, you can use the “Erase” tool to work down to the level of single voxels (or circular or spherical regions of customized size). Familiarizing yourself with all the segment editor tools will generally help you find the most efficient ways to get to your final desired segmentation.
