| So CT would be the best way to get a clearer picture of your own skeleton as high-density structures like bones stand out much better (Hounsfield units and all that). Then you'd have to segment the skeletal system and do a surface-extraction. I have a decent writeup on how to do that with Python and VTK under [1]. MRI might cut it, and unlike CT its not as radioactive, but typically in MR the contrast between soft tissue and bones isn't as pronounced so segmentation becomes trickier. I wrote a post on segmenting my own brain from a head MR I had done and as you can see from the pics the bones don't stand out [2]. Honestly, I dunno how easy it'll be to convince a doctor to write you a referral for a full-body CT scan given the potential health hazards. Then comes the tricky part, no imaging modality or segmentation is perfect and you'll end up with a noisy dataset that won't play well in 3D printing. Prior to the surface extraction you'd have to post-process your segmentation to clean little islands of tissue, possibly even manually, and close holes in the segmented structures. A lot of that can be done automatically but you'll likely have to do some by hand. Medical image processing frameworks like ITK (and SimpleITK in Python) are your friends. What I've found works very well (large part of my PhD was on medical imaging) is multi-modal imaging where you perform a segmentation on two datasets, e.g., MR and CT, registered to one another so you can best disambiguate between soft tissue and bone [3]. You'd then have to extract the surfaces into something like STL and post-process it in some software like MeshLab [4] to create a smooth mesh which you'll extract in a clean STL. That you can print but that's when you'll have to deal with the quirks of 3D printing. Depending on the filament you use overhangs are gonna become and issue (something about molten plastic and gravity I presume) so you may have to split your model into separate pieces that can be 3D printed (I think the skull will be particularly tricky) and then eg glue them together. Before you go down that rabbit hole I propose you try and print a 'clean' skull that has already been segmented. I found [5] to be a fantastic resource of anatomical part models! Have a look at [6] on how to configure the interface to get the skull bones. Good luck! [1] https://pyscience.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/surface-extractio...
[2] https://pyscience.wordpress.com/2014/10/19/image-segmentatio...
[3] https://pyscience.wordpress.com/2014/11/02/multi-modal-image...
[4] http://www.meshlab.net/
[5] http://lifesciencedb.jp/bp3d/
[6] https://imgur.com/a/uGqDA5Y |
As you mentioned, it seems like it will be hard to get a referral for a full-body CT scan as a healthy person. The costs of scans also look pretty steep to quench a curiosity thirst :/
Nevertheless, I appreciate you sharing this knowledge and will try to print a segmented skull to understand the process better.