3D Acquisition of the Ear Anatomy: A Low-Cost Set up Suitable for the Clinical Practice

The most common clinical treatment for ear deformities or non-congenital abnormalities is the reconstruction of the missing geometry using autologous costal cartilage. The surgical procedure consists in cutting, sculpting and suturing harvested costal cartilage from the patient to recreate an ear shape which is symmetric to the contralateral ear. During chirurgical operation, surgeons needs an accurate 3D template as reference to reproduce the ear. For this purpose, reverse engineering and additive manufacturing techniques can be employed. Specifically, this works aims to develop a reliable, low-cost and user-friendly system, to acquire the healthy ear geometry in clinical environment avoiding head patient’s exposition to radiation (MRI, CT scan). An ideal acquisition setup and device have been selected to achieve accurate results. To this end, a casted model of an ear was created as reference, and the best setup was evaluated by comparing the obtained 3D reconstructions with it. Once the setup has been determined, the anatomies of five volunteers were acquired, to test the methodology on human subjects.