A few months ago I bought my son a Creality LD-002H Resin 3D Printer so we could play around with printing some simple objects. Like most people, we watched a lot of videos to get a better handle on how to (safely) work with resin, printed a bunch of example objects from Thingiverse, and then watched more videos to figure out how to make better prints. While printing models has been fun, I'd really like the kids to get a better handle on how to create their own objects through photogrammetry tools like Meshroom or editors like Blender.
The last few weeks I've been working through the details of how I could convert and CT scan of me into something I could print. Through a combination of open-source tools I was able to generate a mesh model of my pelvis and print a small version of it. I seem to forget how to use all these tools after a few days, so this post is just some notes for me to be able to recreate the process in the future.
Viewing CT Data in 3D Slicer
Back in 2013 I had to go to the hospital because I had a bad infection that needed surgery. The doctors ran me through a CT machine to get a better view of what was happening inside me. After my surgery I learned that Kaiser will burn a CD with your data on it for only $20 if you ask them. Being curious, I ordered a copy and poked around with it for a bit. While the data isn't in a format that I recognized, a viz friend pointed me at a tool called 3D Slicer (based on VTK) that's designed to look at medical data. It's a little confusing to get started, but you basically:
Start Slicer
Use 'Add Data' to point it at your CD
Use DICOM to see the available entries in the data
Select the entry with scan data (eg SAG 3MM) and Load
Change to volume rendering and open the eye icon
Adjust the Shift value to change the threshold level
I always stumble around with the default view settings. Usually the problem is that I haven't loaded a DICOM entry with anything in it (eg, a patient record) or I forgot to tell Slicer to view the data by turning the volume's closed eye into an open eye. Once the 3D data shows up, I switch to a 3D-only view by selecting View and Layout.
Extracting and Smoothing Contours
While the volume rendering tool is a nice way to poke through the data, what you really need to do is extract the contour for the bone so you can extract it as a mesh (ie, isosurfacing). To do this you need to run the Segmentation tool to build a mesh and then smooth it to make it more printable.
Turn off the volume rendering
Switch to the Segment Editor
Select the Master volume to segment (note: default may not be right)
Add a new segment and click Edit
Click Show 3D to view
Select Threshold, pick a value, and then apply
Use Islands to remove background noise
Use Smoothing to fix some bumps
It took some trial and error to find a threshold value that produced a good view of my pelvis (too low and you get tissue, too high and the bone starts disappearing). The two main issues I saw with segmentation were that some regions had small holes and some curving regions were bumpy like corduroy. Selecting the Smoothing option from the Segmentation options helped fix some of these problems. I'm sure you could do a lot more here to fix things- some of the videos I watched showed how to get precise segmentation by hand labeling points. I'm not printing an actual hip replacement so I didn't go into to much detail. Once I was done I clicked on the Segmentations button and exported to STL.
Cleanup in Meshlab
I pulled the STL file into MeshLab to verify it looked ok in another meshing tool and do some additional cleanup. While I think Slicer can do this cleanup, MeshLab seemed like an easier way to make some hand edits. I looked around in the mesh and manually removed some leftover polygons.
Adding Supports in Chitubox
The final step for me was to load the model into Chitubox to turn it into printable object. Chitubox is pretty amazing- it'll analyze an object and figure out what supports would be added to make it printable on a 3D printer. My neighbor does a lot of 3D printing and gave me a lot of tips on making good prints with Chitubox. eg, Make the back side of the model face the build plate so the supports don't leave bumps in important places, angle the structure to make it easier to build, use the skate support platform shape to make it easier to remove, etc.
I manually placed the pelvis model and rotated it slightly, but pretty much used the default settings everywhere else. Even with a ton of supports, Chitubox still wasn't too happy with the printing risk. Once it was done I adjusted the print's first layer exposure time to 60s and the remaining layers to 6s. Based on previous prints, if you don't expose the first layer for long enough it doesn't stick to the build plate and your print fails.
Printing, Cleaning, and Curing
The final step was to take the model to the printer and print it out. Resin printing is a pretty messy and dangerous process. You align the print head (crucial!), pour resin into the vat, load the vat into the printer, and then print the model. This print took about four hours, but I didn't have to babysit it after I verified the first few layers had stuck. When it finished, I chiseled the part off the build plate and dropped it in a pickle jar (w/ strainer) filled with isopropyl to clean off the uncured resin. After a lot of shaking, I took it out and clipped off all the supports (which is unusually satisfying). From there I did another quick rinse in isopropyl, patted it down with paper towels, and put it under a UV light to cure it.
I'm still new to 3D printing but I think it looks pretty decent. The main problem with this print is that I scratched it up quite a bit when I was cleaning it up with paper towels (the print is still pretty soft at this point). In the future I'll probably buy a curing station which simplifies a lot of the cleaning and curing problems. The other problem with the print is that there are some extra holes in the back because I set the contouring threshold value too high. At least that's what I hope- maybe I just have really thin bones.
Safety and Cleanup
I should point out that the resin I'm using is toxic when uncured and it's important to follow safety procedures when doing this kind of printing. I wear disposable nitrile gloves and safety classes whenever I work with uncured resin, and crack the garage door to help vent the area. When it comes time to handling wet prints my neighbor suggested a practice of having one clean hand and one dirty hand, since there's always something you need to grab and you want to minimize what gets dirty. I use an excessive amount of isopropyl to clean up the build plate, vat, and tools when I'm done. Fortunately, you can just leave all the dirty towels and gloves in the sun for 30mins to cure them and make them safe for disposal.
There was a lot of talk on local social media this week about a large military plane that flew over Livermore at a very low altitude. The town is already wound up about larger planes flying into Livermore because there's an expansion plan being discussed that would allow private charter 737s to land at the airport. Seeing a massive, loud military plane flying low over town made everyone wonder if that's what daily life is going to be like in the next few years.
There was a lot of speculation about what was going on with this flight. Some people thought it was emergency vaccine supplies being dropped off. Others claimed it was a military salute for a Lt. Col. in Pleasanton who was just awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. In the end it turned out to be a C-17 Globemaster doing a practice landing approach at our municipal airport (see Brodie Brazil's video of the approach).
Tracking SOUND87
I went to my PiAware node and pulled the day's data to see what military flights took place on Wednesday. I found AE07E0 was active around the 4pm time period people were talking about. Interestingly, the flight used the call sign SOUND87, which made me wonder if this was some kind of sound test for the airport extension (I doubt it now- it seems like a routine test). As the below plots show, the plane flew in from the east, passed the airport, and made a sharp turn north. Zooming in on the east side of town, I noticed it flew right over LLNL at about 2K ft, just a block away from their $3.5B national ignition facility (NIF). I'd thought they had a no-fly zone over them, but that seems to only be for drones. Here is the raw data for the flight.
Debunking the Salute Theory
The idea that the military would dive bomb a city to show its appreciation of a soldier bothered me, so I went to FlightRadar24 and pulled up the data for the whole flight. As seen below, they took off from Vegas, circled the bay area, and then dropped in on Livermore. After that, they flew north to Concord and did a similar practice approach at Concord's municipal airport (CCR) before landing at Travis AFB. Given that they didn't fly anywhere near Pleasanton and they made a second drop somewhere else, I'd guess this has nothing to do with the Lt. Col's award.
Questioning the Airport Expansion
One thing this flight really highlights is that Livermore people will notice larger planes flying to our airport. While the C-17 is much bigger and louder than the 737s the expansion is targeting, it made a lot of people realize that the airport approach really does stretch all the way across town, starting at the $3.5B big science experiment at the lab. I hope enough people stand up to the FAA and prevent larger planes from being able to land there.
One of the weirder news stories that came out when Trump announced he had COVID-19 was that the US's doomsday planes are now hovering, poised to send out missile launch commands to submarines. It looks like this started when someone on twitter noticed that some of the US's Boeing E-6B planes were heading out to the oceans on the east and west coasts, and that these planes are the mobile command centers for coordinating with submarines. Twitter and Fox did what they do best and went off the rails trying to figure out what this all means. Fortunately, plane spotters like Christiaan Triebert and others properly dumped flight histories to show that these flights actually happen all the time. I didn't know anything about these planes so I spent the morning reading wikipedia and looking through my data to see if I could find them. Yep! There are some in CA and they do show up all the time! Relax.
Boeing E-6 Mercury Planes
From Wikipedia, the Boeing E-6 Mercury is a variant of the Boeing 707 that was made for the military to provide communication among resources in case ground systems are wiped out. There are 16 of these planes in use, and from ADS-B.NL you can learn that their ICAO ids are AE040D-AE041C (conveniently sequential in the military ICAO range). I've been leaving my flight tracker on all the time since the outbreak so I did some greps on my recent data. Sure enough, I found some hits in yesterday's data. Digging through all my data and plugging it into pandas yielded the below breakdown of how many days each plane flew near me over the last few months.
As the above shows, I saw five different E-6 planes, with some of them being active as many as 10 days out of the month. While the tracker was up a lot of the time, there were some gaps in March, August, and September (the tracker crashed without me knowing it for a week; I powered it off for a few days when the garage was over 110 degrees; we had a few power outages during the fires).
Heading out to Sea
Looking through the tracks, there are several instances where the planes fly out to sea and circle around a lot. The following tracks are from July 26, August 13, and September 14. As these tracks show, flying out to sea is not an uncommon event.
Information is Surprise
Information theory elegantly defines "information" as a measurement of how much surprise is in the data. Things that happen all the time are not news. Unusual events are. Reporting on these "doomsday planes" without giving some background info is providing news- but the news for most people is just that the US has these planes at all. Taking a broader look at the data you find that these flights do not seem to be related to Trump's health, and that we don't need to assume the worst just yet.
Looking at the fire-fighting helicopter data made me wonder what other helicopters fly around our area. I didn't know if there was an identifier that the FAA uses to distinguish planes from helicopters, but when I looked at the FAA site I noticed that they had a database field that designated whether the aircraft was for government use or not. I skimmed through the list of aircraft registered in Alameda and found the following gov planes: two sheriff's cesnas (N10CX and N5525U), three Oakland police helicopters (N220PD, N330PD, and N510PD), and two helicopters registered to the East-Bay Regional Park District (N708PD and N996PD). I didn't know the EBRPD had helicopters, but thinking about it it's not surprising. EBRPD manages parks all over the bay area, many of which are far off into the hills. Their operations page talks about how they use the helicopters to support police tasks, fight fires (they have their own water buckets), and do rescue work (I've thought about this on some of the long bike rides I've done with the kids back into Morgan Territory).
Fire Inspections
Looking through my flight data I found that the EBRPD helicopters are sent out periodically to check on the different parks. The fires from the lightning strikes the other week have been awful though, so it looks like the EBRPD helicopters have been doing more flights over the areas. The below track from September 5th shows how they go out to Chabot, Morgan Territory, Diablo, Sunol, the Pleasanton Ridge, and Brushy Peak.
Police Activity
Looking through the data some more I spotted a few of the Oakland Police Department helicopters. So far, these usually seem to fly out from Oakland to check things out along the interstate, but sometimes they seem to be circling some activity like the below (maybe something was happening at the Oakland Zoo?). One of the interesting things about all this is that while they broadcast their location over ADSB, aggregate sites like FlightRadar don't report the PD helicopter positions (I think plane owners can request that their tracks not be reported on these sites). The data is out there, you just have to know how to get it.
Someone on the Livermore version of NextDoor posted yesterday that there was a helicopter hovering in the south part of town and that they wanted to know if anyone knew what was up. As usual the brighter minds of Livermore had the usual "government helicopter" conspiracy theories so I decided to take a look at the ADSB data I'd collected to see if there were any helicopters in it. I'd never tried looking specifically for helicopters, so I just skimmed the ID list and checked out everything that didn't match a prefix for a known airline (eg, SWA for Southwest). That turned up N404AJ, a twin-rotor Chinook operated by Billings Flying Service that's been helping put out the fires south of Livermore.
Tracks
It looks like the helicopter left the area yesterday to fight the new fire near Fresno, but these two tracks I captured show how they've been using Livermore as a staging ground to fight fires south of town. They've been landing near Poppy Ridge at Meadowlark Field, which also happens to have a giant Star Wars Rebel Alliance symbol in the field next to it.
Looking around the web some more, I found some photos of the helicopter and the video at the top of this post about how BFS contracted someone to build a tank module so they can dump fire suppressant on fires. So no, tin-foil-hatters of Livermore, not a secret Government operation- just fire fighters protecting your McMansions.
