Forensic Facial Reconstruciotn of St. Catherine of Genua (technical report)

Hi all,

this year we worked on several Forensic Facial Reconstruction (FFR) with our expert Cicero Moraes. One of these projects regards St. Catherine of Genua, whos mortal remains are preserved in the church of the "Santissima Annunziata di Portoria", in Genua, and are considered by the Roman Catholic Church, among the so-called "incorrupted bodies".

The FFR project has been very interesting, since it needed some extraordinary procedures, due to three factors: the exceptional conditions of preservation of the body, the particular structure of the sarcophagus and the history of the different necroscopic reconnaissances of the relics of the Saint.

In order to perform the final FFR, we had to adapt our protocol to this particular situation. The solution came from a 3D model produced with SfM-MVS techniques, without opening the sarcophagus, and from some reverse engineering techniques related with the "Coherent Anatomical Deformation", developed in 2014.

Thanks to the kindness of padre Vittorio Casalino, we can now share not only the final result of our study (image below), but also the scientific report (by now, unfortunately, only in Italian), which you can read on ResearchGate, Academia or simply on the Arc-Team Digital Archive.

The final model of St. Catherine of Genua developed by Arc-Team (FFR by Cicero Moraes, 3D data acquisition by Alessandro Bezzi, historical research by Luca Bezzi)

I will try to translate the text in English ASAP (any help is greatly appreciated), but in the meantime I hope this version will be useful, also to go on with the scientific discussion about FFR (which is pretty animated in the last year).

Have a nice day!

I made my own surgical guide using OrtogOnBlender!

Those who follow my work know that I develop an addon called OrtogOnBlender, a learning tool for surgical planning.

I have had the honor of using it to teach many people and also develop surgical guides for the fields of human and veterinary health.

The fact is that these past few weeks, for the first time, I have been using this technology in my own body.

It all started when my dentist asked me to do a CT-scan of an injury that insisted on not completely healing.

Coincidentally, I was teaching a computer graphics course in my city, and my students included radiology and endodontic surgery specialists.

In commenting on my need, I was instructed to take the exam and took the opportunity to proceed with a broad approach. In addition to the tomography of the teeth, they also digitized them in 3D (intraoral digitization). I am very grateful to the staff of the Santa Izabel Clinic, especially Dr. Carlos Augusto Abascal Shiguihara and Dr. Gabriela Zorron Cavalcanti, since I was extremely well attended there.

The first thing we did when we received the CT-scan was to isolate the lesion and reconstruct it in 3D using the Slicer 3D semi-automatic segmentation option. It is evident that the work was followed from the beginning by the surgeon, Dr. Roosevelt Macedo of Statto Clinic, also located in the city I currently live, Sinop-MT, more or less in central Brazil.

Once the lesion was isolated and positioned in a 3D space, I was then able to reconstruct the tomography directly by OrtogOnBlender and import the lesion (in red).

To improve the fit of the future surgical guide, I aligned the teeth from intraoral scanning with those of tomography.

Now we had the teeth, root and lesion very well positioned.

Using OrtogOnBlender's guide creation tools, we designed a structure that fit the teeth while maintaining a safe distance from the gums.

The purpose of the guide was to inform the surgeon of the exact projection of the lesion so that he could access it laterally when drilling the bone.

Here we have a bottom view of the model where we see the tentacular aspect of the guide.

We exported the model as STL and it was printed in high resolution 3D on the premises of Santa Izabel Clinic.

Fine print, but would the model fit properly?

I went to Dr. Roosevelt Macedo's clinic for a test and the model fit perfectly!

We arranged the day of surgery and prepared myself for it.

Snap test at surgery.

Lateral perforation. The image has been edited with grayscale and jagged to avoid shocking readers.

As expected the guide worked very well and allowed the surgeon to find and remove the injury.

I greatly thank the staff of Statto Clinic for the excellent treatment offered.

More than thank the doctors and health experts, I also thank my friend and project partner, Adriano Barreto, who organized the course that kicked off this event.

I hope this is the beginning of a history of using 3D technology more effectively and presently, not only in major cities, but also in more inland cities like mine. It is a great honor and joy to participate in all this, and of course, thanks to you who have read this far.

If OrtogOnBlender interests you, be sure to read the official documentation and download the system that runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux:

https://bit.ly/35nweMC

A big hug!