Open Access

For certain cardiovascular diseases, cannulas are implanted into the blood circuit. To match the patients individual anatomy of the heart, there is research for cannulas to be custom-designed and manufactured aided by 3D printing. However, cannulas have to hold very high standards with regard to the smoothness of their surfaces, as rough patches can lead to formation of blood clots. Therefore, this work uses computer vision to detect such patches as part of quality assurance. First, the produced cannula is scanned using a precise CT scanner and transformed into a 3D mesh object. Rough patches in an otherwise smooth but curved surface are detected by using cosine similarity between neighboring faces and a statistical evaluation. In the end, this method is able to raise a warning when curved surfaces are not smooth enough and visualizes the problematic patches. However, there is just limited access to test data currently and the scanner used needs to be upgraded.