Can a 3-D image created by a CT system be loaded into SIMM and animated?
Custom bone models, created from CT or MRI data, can be put into SIMM and animated, but this process has some time-consuming steps. SIMM does not have any utilities to create a polygonal surface model of a bone from medical image data, so you will need to find some other program to do this. (There are several vendors who sell this type of product.) After creating the surface model, you need to convert the file into a format that SIMM can read (the utility program ‘norm,’ which comes with SIMM will do this for you). Once you load the bone into SIMM, you still need to define how it moves relative to the other bones. This involves creating joints and specifying the translations and rotations between the new bone and the old ones. It can take anywhere from one day to a few weeks to do this for a musculoskeletal model with 3 or 4 body segments.
