In this paper, we aim at providing results concerning the application of desktop systems for rapid prototyping of medical replicas
that involve complex shapes, as, for example, folds of a colon. Medical replicas may assist preoperative planning or tutoring in
surgery to better understand the interaction among pathology and organs. Major goals of the paper concern with guiding the
digital design workflow of the replicas and understanding their final performance, according to the requirements asked by the
medics (shape accuracy, capability of seeing both inner and outer details, and support and possible interfacing with other organs).
In particular, after the analysis of these requirements, we apply digital design for colon replicas, adopting two desktop systems. ,e
experimental results confirm that the proposed preprocessing strategy is able to conduct to the manufacturing of colon replicas
divided in self-supporting segments, minimizing the supports during printing. ,is allows also to reach an acceptable level of final
quality, according to the request of having a 3D presurgery overview of the problems. ,ese replicas are compared through reverse
engineering acquisitions made by a structured-light system, to assess the achieved shape and dimensional accuracy. Final results
demonstrate that low-cost desktop systems, coupled with proper strategy of preprocessing, may have shape deviation in the range
of ±1 mm, good for physical manipulations during medical diagnosis and explanation
