Material imaging study of 3D printing materials for diagnostic radiology phantom development

The 3D printing techniques have found applications across diverse fields, significantly enhancing design and manufacturing processes. The impact of this growth is particularly notable in radiology, where 3D printing has been applied to developing quality control tools and advancing dosimetry techniques. 3D printing has the advantage of having a wide variety of plastic materials which can be used in the manufacturing process; there is a scarcity of work developed to evaluate the attenuation of the x-ray beam of the materials used in printing 3D models for phantom development. This paper aims to show our results on the imaging characteristics investigation of 15 3D printable materials. 3D objects were printed as cubes of 20 x 20 x 20 mm3 with a 100% infill and 45°/45° rectilinear structural pattern, and images acquired in a DR X-ray unit were analyzed with ImageJ software. Imaging pixel values, Signal-to-Noise Ratio – SNR and Contrast-to-Noise Ratio – CNR were evaluated and compared between the 3D-printed cubes and a standard chest phantom. When comparing the SNR for plastic materials and chest structures, significant differences were found. Similar results were found for the CNR. The differences were noted for both plastic materials, Tungsten and Bismuth, that demonstrated statistically significant values of SNR compared to the lung (p < 0.0001) and right rib (p < 0.0001). Tungsten and Bismuth filaments were found to have the potential to represent the SNR for intermediary and high-density structures. Scapula was the only anatomical structure with no statistically significant difference of the CNR for SILK (p ≥ 0.074), ABS (p ≥ 0.086), PVA (p ≥ 0.917) and ABSpremium (p ≥ 0.955). The study of potential radiological 3D printing materials for diagnostic radiology phantom development revealed important imaging characteristics for the plastic materials using the Fused Filament Fabrication technique.