Virtual Trauma of Petrous bone fracture under lateral impact : from medical images to fracture process evaluation

Materials and methods A CT-Scan of a volunteer without pathology in relation with the Petrous bone was used to build a numerical model. Using Scan2Mesh [6], a tool dedicated to the generation of a mesh from medical data, 169 slices separated by a thickness of 0.6 millimeters were processed, using an automatic detection method based on thresholding. Then an anatomist checked the detected contours of the bone in order to validate them. Once the contours were validated on the whole 3D data, they were processed by the Marching-Octaedra algorithm, a fast and precise 3D reconstruction method [4], which leads to a 3D reconstruction of the bone and its mesh. The 3D Petrous bone mesh obtained is composed by tria/tetra elements, including cortical bone and spongious bone components (Fig. 1).