by
Lisa Chamoff, Contributing Reporter | May 06, 2014
From the May 2014 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
“We are adding a level of complexity to the printed tissue that isn’t there if you only have a single cell type present,” Kolesky says.
What can be implanted
In 2012, doctors at the University of Michigan obtained emergency clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and implanted a 3-D printed splint in a three-month-old boy suffering from a severe case of tracheobronchomalacia, a rare condition in which the airways collapse during breathing and coughing.
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“3-D printing really allows fine structures to be put in place that you can’t get by hand, so true engineering can be applied to it,” Dr. Glenn Green, associate professor of pediatric otolaryngology at the University of Michigan, told DOTmed News last year.
3-D printing technology allows for rapid manufacture of small numbers of parts with precise detail. The technology has also evolved to create very fine facial features. In Wales, a team of surgeons and design engineering experts has been using 3-D printing in complex mid-facial reconstruction surgeries. The Centre for Applied Reconstructive Technologies in Surgery (CARTIS) — a partnership between staff at the Maxillofacial Unit at Morriston Hospital in Swansea, Wales, and the National Centre for Product Design and Development Research at Cardiff Metropolitan University — worked together for a recent high-profile operation on a man whose face had been crushed in a 2012 motorcycle accident, using custom-printed prototype bone models, surgical guides and implants.
The team used CT scans to create a computer model, which was used to plan the operation, based on restoring facial symmetry by cutting and moving sections of bone. Cutting and re-positioning guides, and custom implants were then designed and 3-D printed in metal. These tools enabled the computer plan to be translated into surgery by accurately guiding the surgeon’s instruments and enabling the separate bone sections to be located and fixed in the correct position.
Dr. Dominic Eggbeer, head of surgical and prosthetic design at Cardiff Metropolitan University, says it was a particularly challenging case. “You have to cut the bones in a very precise way, and move them in a very precise way, and fix them in a very precise way,” Eggbeer says.
The university takes on about 500 cases a year across the UK, mainly head and neck reconstruction, such as fixing large defects in skull and implanting small devices in the mid-face. The design staff uses software from South Carolina company 3D Systems.
