Quantification of the accuracy of additive manufactured (3D printed) medical models

Additive Manufacturing (AM) also known as 3D Printing is one of the advanced fabrication method in production of physical models from virtual models. One of the medical applications in AM technique is preplanning the surgery. For this, the surgeons use medical models for measurement, evaluation of the diseases and surgical procedures. On the other hand, fabricating the accurate (patient specific dimensional) model is one of the hectic problems to be solved. This paper represents dimensional error in between the 3D CAD mandible model to AM mandible models of cyst present in the mandible patient, and comparison of dimensional errors between the fabricated models of Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) and Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) methods. It has been observed that the dimensional error between SLS and FDM mandible models from a 3D CAD mandible model is 6.03% and 8.33% respectively.