Mineral exploration is a complex process that is carried out through the integration of different methods such as Geology, Geophysics, Geochemistry, and drilling. Building a 3D model of a deposit is the main goal of mineral exploration. The main issue is to acquire more information in less time and by lower costs. To reach this goal and obtain more exploration data, new techniques and combination of methods are inevitable. In this research combination of geophysical and drilling was used in The Abassabad copper mine located in Miami-Sabzevar mineralization belt northeast Iran as a case study. Four geophysical profiles within the borehole locations, including: induced polarization (IP) and electrical resistivity (ER), were designed. Then surveying was done and the data were collected. After IP and ER data inversion, 2D sections were prepared. The 3D block models of IP and ER were constructed by geostatistical methods. The correlation between geophysical parameters and drilling data was examined by statistical, geostatistical, and artificial intelligence methods in the location of the boreholes. Based on the mentioned methods copper grade was estimated and the 3D block models of Cu grade were constructed. Obtained models were checked and compared with real Cu model compiled according to drilling data which was done after geophysical measurements and the error level was calculated for estimation method. According to this the error level for Regression result is 15.63%, results of cokriging is 8.75% and the error level was 6.25% for ANN methods. Overall, it was deduced that the usage of ANN algorithm in economic evaluation of mineral resources provides more accurate, reliable estimations. Results of this paper shows that the location and number of additional boreholes can be optimized by the combination of geophysical data and drilling results. We could reduce the number of boreholes and the cost of the exploration operation significantly. Based on these results, we devised exploration plan for the other areas of the Miami-Sabzevar mineralization belt.
