We use Mimics software, which is pricey but sooooo easy to do stuff like this. Here I’ve just had a very quick pass at reconstructing the distal hindlimb (limb except the thigh, which had bad scan artifacts). With more effort, I could remove the pesky artifacts around the knee and ankle (2 uppermost joints), although some of those are unavoidable because the leg was too damn big for the CT scanner gantry (70cm diameter; leg was around 60cm across at largest).
So how long did this process take? The hardest part was moving the leg around and positioning it on the CT table. Then the scan (608 cross-sectional slices) took about 15 minutes to do, then 15 more minutes to transfer over to my PC. Loading the DICOM slices of data and making a movie (previous post) took 5 minutes, and then making this 3D reconstruction movie took just another 5 minutes, although I waited a few days because I was busy.
So, when operating at peak efficiency, we can obtain decent 3D models from frozen specimens in less than an hour. This is but one example of how modern technology, especially X-ray computed tomography and computer hardware/graphics software, have massively transformed any research that deals with anatomy. When I was doing my PhD back in the 90′s, this would have been a much more time-intensive procedure (probably weeks of work, and difficulties getting CT access); in the 80′s it would basically have been impossible.
In the future, now, we’ll be using these models (once cleaned up a bit) with data from dissection to model how the limbs work in a real giraffe. More about that later. The Giraffe-A-Thon is over for now. I hope you enjoyed it! More of the same to come on this blog!
