Converting NII to STL Files

[Jennifer Mak]

Hello,

I've been using Trackvis to see the different white-matter tracts and I want to be able to make 3D models of them. Trackvis saves ROIs as .nii files. Does anyone know of a way to make meshes out of these files so that the final product is in .stl format and can be imported into modeling softwares like SolidWorks or Meshmixer?

Thank you.

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Jennifer Mak

Virginia Commonwealth University

Biomedical Engineering, Honors College

Class of 2019

[Rodrigo Perea]

Hi Jennifer, 

Could you expand more on what you meant with "...to make 3D models of them" ? 

Are you wanting to create a 3Dimensional representation of specific tracts?

If so, I would advice you to stay in *.trk space which interpolates the streamlines to be smoothed instead of in a voxel-by-voxel representation in *.nii (cube-by-cube looking). You could also try opening the files (*.trk format) in dsi_studio instead and try it on for what you need. Or create functions that read_in the *.trk file format (http://www.trackvis.org/docs/?subsect=fileformat ). I created a function that does this in matlab in case you are interested (https://github.com/Drigomaniac/rotrk_landmarks/blob/master/rotrk_read.m ). 

All the best, 

Rodrigo