looking to process a CAD file like a medical image... what is the best file format, between igs, x_t or sat...?

1

Dear ITK users,

I would like to process a CAD file like a medical tomographic image, e.g. compute a distance map from the boundary towards a medial axis. It appears that the company making the file available to me can give me three options for file formats: igs, x_t or sat. Which would be the best option, amongst those three? From what I can tell based on some preliminary googling, igs produces a set of surface primitives (not sure if watertight or not), while sat may support volumetric primitives.

Thanks for your kind support.

Michel

2

ITK cannot read any of those 3. If you want to process with ITK, it needs to be in one of the supported image formats or mesh formats (modules names starting with Mesh*). So you will need some software which can export to one of the supported formats.

3

Thanks, Dzenan. I guess the way forward is to look into the best converters out there that will preserve the geometric properties as best as possible. I suppose it’s not surprising that this application has not come up in the medical image analysis community. It’s closer to the simulation community.

4

You might also try getting your file into VTK, since VTK supports more file formats. Then once in VTK you can export to something ITK supports. Here are the formats available in VTK:

https://vtk.org/Wiki/VTK/FAQ#What_3D_file_formats_can_VTK_import_and_export.3F

5

Thanks, Dave. I was thinking along those lines. Cheers.

1 Like