83 year-old woman got 3D-printed mandible. 3D printed mandible (credit: University of Hasselt) The University of Hasselt (Belgium) has announced that Belgian and Dutch scientists have successfully replaced a lower jaw with a 3D printed model for a 83 year-old woman, 3Ders.org reports. According to the researchers, It is the first custom-made implant in the world to replace an entire lower jaw. Normally it takes a few days to produce a custom implant, but with 3D printing technology it takes only a few hours. Neurosurgeons Are 3D Printing - Fabbaloo Blog - Fabbaloo.
BioPrinting: Organovo Strikes Agreements - Fabbaloo Blog - Fabbaloo. Scaffolds are three dimensional structures. Scientists at the Fraunhofer Institute have developed a new way to 3D print bioscaffolds. Scaffolds are three dimensional structures on which organic material (cells) may grow into properly formed tissue structures. Typically the scaffold then dissolves, leaving the newly formed tissue.
The new process involves hitting a liquid concoction mixture of polymers and proteins with a microchip laser pulse - but one only picoseconds in duration. The extremely short pulse is sufficient to cause reactions that solidify the liquid, but not long enough to damage any of the biomaterial. This technique permits 3D printing of biostructures with a resolution of as little as a micrometer! The researchers hope to use the technology produce tiny cells scaffolds that will enable close study of cell growth patterns in three dimensions, which is not entirely understood.
Image credit: Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT. 3D Printing biomaterial with stem cells. More Metal - This Time Saving Lives! Both ProMetal and Sintef have been working on metal printing processes, quite different from traditional plastics and powders of other 3D print processses. One of the barriers to more common use of 3D printing (aside from cost and print time) is the robustness of the printed objects.
If only they could be printed in something stronger, like, say, metal? We'll add another metal service to the list today: Arcam AB, whose tagline is "CAD TO METAL". They're not kidding: During the CAD to Metal process, an electron beam melts metal powder in a layer-by-layer process to build the physical part. The Arcam EBM machines use a powder bed configuration and are capable of producing multiple parts in the same build This process appears similar to that used by ProMetal, and may have been where Shapeways printed the winning design in Titanium.
Via Arcam, 3News, Ponoko and TreeHugger. Objet's Clear Bio-Material. Commercial 3D printer manufacturer Objet has released a new very interesting print material: MED610, which is a transparent bio-compatible substance. You might think that making a clear, safe substance would be easy, but it's not. In order to qualify for such a designation numerous tests and certifications are required, and that's the tough work that Objet has completed.
According to their description: The material is ideal for applications requiring prolonged skin contact of over 30 days and short term mucosal-membrane contact of up to 24 hours. Objet Bio-Compatible material has 5 medical approvals including Cytotoxicity, Genotoxicity, Delayed Type Hypersensitivity, Irritation and USP Plastic Class VI* While this material will typically be used for dental items, one wonders what one might print if we were able to use this material on our home 3D printers. Printing Blood Vessels - Fabbaloo Blog - Fabbaloo. Printing solid objects is pretty easy: you just extrude/fuse/sinter/flash the layers and you've got your whatever-it-is-you-wanted. It's easy because typically these 3D prints are a uniform material all the way through. Occasionally experiments are done with multiple materials and one commercial 3D printer maker (Objet) has a technology that can print mixes of two different materials, but by and large 3D printed objects are pretty simple in structure.
This is why Bioprinting is so hard. When you want to print living material, it's different because live tissue is a machine composed of many different internal parts, working together to maintain life. However, researches at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany have been working on this very issue and appear to have made some breakthroughs. 3-D printing technology is still too imprecise for the fine structures of capillary vessels. Organ Printing Pondered - Fabbaloo Blog - Fabbaloo. Transform medical 2D CT or MRI data into usable 3D models. We ran across an interesting video that talks about Materialise's ventures into the medical manufacturing space. We've posted about medical uses of 3D print tech before, but Materialise specializes in this niche, and have for quite some time. Materialise produces 3D software specifically designed for this market: Mimics, which can transform medical 2D CT or MRI data into usable 3D models. From those models prosthetics or other medical implants can be derived.
In the video you'll see students using the software to design a prosthetic leg for Cassidy the dog. How popular is this approach? Via YouTube. Fingers Restored By 3D Scanning - Fabbaloo Blog - Fabbaloo. Did you ever take a very close look at your fingers? They are incredibly complex machines, with not only shape and texture, but also motion. Imagine if fate caused the loss of one or more of them? There are solutions today, such as those produced by Didrick Medical, who make a kind of finger-harness that fits over the hand and implements an "active-function artificial finger prostheses".
The design permits a variety of finger loss scenarios to be resolved. This is their "X-Finger" product. But the problem is in the build. Turns out that everyone's hands and fingers are pretty much unique. Didrick Medical's approach is to custom design each and every X-Finger to perfectly match the recipient. Enter 3D Laser Scanning from GKS Global Services, who used their equipment and software to gather the necessary 3D modelling data much more quickly than had been done manually. Via LaserDesign. 3D model of a finger bone. New Scientist reports on a medical breakthrough using 3D printing: exact replicas of finger bones have been produced.
Christian Weinand of Berne Switzerland has been testing a new technique in which a 3D model of a finger bone is fed into a 3D printer, and an exact duplicate is printed. By using a suitable print medium (in this case "tricalcium phosphate and a type of polylactic acid - natural structural materials found in the human body") the resulting artificial bone can be inserted into the body and take over for the failed bone. Weinand says: In theory, you could do any bone.
Now I can put spares in my pocket if I want. You're probably wondering exactly how you get a 3D model of a bone that requires replacement. Via New Scientist. Medical applications & Equipment.