Overview

Prosthetics are a product in high demand. With an estimated 70,000 prosthetics designed every year, each ranging from $5,000 to $50,000, one would expect a single prosthetic to last their owner a long time. In reality, prosthetics get replaced every 3-5 years.

Why so short a lifetime? Because the current prosthetic design process is riddled with errors:

  1. It’s imprecise. Most prosthetists physically touch amputated limbs to develop a molding.
  2. It’s laborious. Patients have to wait weeks or months to receive their prosthetic.
  3. It’s ineffective. Even when patients receive their limb, it may become uncomfortable due to changes in the body’s shape and size.

A Better Way

A new design process being developed by researchers at the University of Michigan is trying to fix these problems by creating a reconfigurable prosthetic socket. The benefits are numerous:

3DSlicer and FastSlice

At the heart of the design process for the reconfigurable prosthetic socket is 3DSlicer, an open-source software program that helps turn limb scans into precise 3D models. These 3D models are then used to help fit the patient with a custom prosthetic socket.

The problem with 3DSlicer is that it’s laborious: researchers must manually mark off nerves and bones on thousands of cross-sections of a given limb. This annotation process alone takes 5-6 hours.

The solution? FastSlice, an extension custom-built for 3DSlicer and the prosthetic design process. Using FastSlice, prosthetists can quickly select nerve and bone in patient CT scans, reducing the time needed to complete the annotation process by 80%.

Features

Features for our alpha release include:

Features for our beta release include:

Features for our omega release include:

Installation

To start using FastSlice, follow the installation instructions.

Contribute

We welcome pull requests on the FastSlice repository.