# Volumetric mesh of vertebrae - difficulty with meshing the interior

**URL:** <https://discourse.slicer.org/t/volumetric-mesh-of-vertebrae-difficulty-with-meshing-the-interior/17376>\
**Category:** Support\
**Tags:** 3d-model, meshing\
**Created:** [April 28, 2021, 9:09pm UTC](https://discourse.slicer.org/t/volumetric-mesh-of-vertebrae-difficulty-with-meshing-the-interior/17376 "2021-04-28T21:09:58Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 4

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**Author:** ![lassoan](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/flex002/user_avatar/discourse.slicer.org/lassoan/32/13_2.png) [@lassoan](https://discourse.slicer.org/u/lassoan)\
**Post date:** [April 29, 2021, 1:13am UTC](https://discourse.slicer.org/t/volumetric-mesh-of-vertebrae-difficulty-with-meshing-the-interior/17376/4 "2021-04-29T01:13:18Z")

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Once you have the solidified (and merged) segment, you can use SegmentMesher module to create a volumetric mesh. Or export as a surface mesh and use [any other mesher](https://discourse.slicer.org/t/meshing-self-intersecting-faces/13588/2).

You can specify material models, loads, boundary conditions, etc. in the preprocessor of your solver. If it helps, you can save the CT density values at each mesh point using “Probe volume with model” module.

People have asked about vertebral FEM modeling many times on this forum, but unfortunately we did not get much updates form them later, so we don’t know what workflow they ended up implementing - but a few tips:

- Not many FEM tool can read VTK unstructured grids, but FEBio/FEBio Studio can, and it is free and works quite nicely for biomedical applications.
- If you want to use SegmentMesher output in software that cannot read VTK unstructured grid files then you can use meshio Python package to convert to other formats.

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_[View the full topic](https://discourse.slicer.org/t/volumetric-mesh-of-vertebrae-difficulty-with-meshing-the-interior/17376)._