Do you ever wonder how previous generations would have responded to current breakthrough technological developments? Imagine demonstrating 3-D printing for Gutenberg or Ben Franklin and experiencincing their reactions.
Every day yields astonishing progress in medical 3-D printing; advances in software, hardware and materials that we once thought were far in the future are now being used to improve patient care at health systems around the country. At the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore, we recently acquired a 3-D printer that allows us to reap the benefits of this technology through teaching, diagnostic training and improving patient health outcomes.
[See: 8 Cool Uses of 3-D Printers in Health Care.]
It’s exciting to see how medical 3-D printing is converting imaging studies like a CT scan into tangible, patient-specific 3-D models. It’s as if your CT scan was an instruction book to creating a model of your body. We work closely with our colleagues in various disciplines to create the 3-D models. Our process involves using state-of-the-art scanning techniques, with low-dose radiation, to obtain a high resolution CT scan. We then use dedicated software to convert the images into a format that can be printed by the 3-D printer into a model of the part of the body that was scanned.
At CHAM, plastic and reconstructive surgeons Dr. Oren Tepper and Dr. Evan Garfein are using the 3-D printer to create anatomical reference models and intraoperative surgical guides for various reconstructive procedures. They have also incorporated virtual surgical planning in combination with 3-D printing for complex craniofacial procedures. These technologies allow the surgeons to plan out procedures in advance of stepping into the operating room, and even practice the impending surgery on the 3-D printed model, which has been shown to improve results by decreasing operative time, anesthesia time, length of hospital stay and unexpected complications.
[See: 8 Health Technologies to Watch For.]
A recent example of this was the separation of twin boys conjoined at the head. Dr. Tepper and Dr. Garfein worked with pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. James Goodrich and neuro-radiologist Dr. Jack Farinhas to create models from the CT scans of the boys’ skulls and use them as guides to successfully separate them. The team used these models to plan each stage of this complex series of procedures in advance. It’s a process that we hope to utilize more often for a variety of different surgical cases.
While the current uses are impressive, we can see that there are innumerable future applications in medicine that would be beneficial for many more patients. One example would be the ability to print custom-made patient-specific prosthetics/implants to help patients overcome congenital or acquired deformities. Imagine dropping off your CT scan and getting a personalized custom-made hip replacement. It’s remniscent of, back in the day, dropping off film at the pharmacy for development into physical photographs.
[See: How to Prepare for Hip Replacement Surgery.]
As the technology continues to improve, we hope that one day we’ll be able to utilize stem cells and biological material to custom create internal vital organs such as the trachea (windpipe), replacement arteries and a host of other structures, without the fear of the body rejecting these objects. We’re not there yet, but day by day we’re getting closer. 3-D printing is changing the world around us, and we believe that somebody it’ll have the ability to fix things inside us, too.
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A Printing Press for the New Millennium: How 3-D Printing Is Changing Medicine originally appeared on usnews.com
