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3-D printing
technology allows you to print in three dimensions, instead of usual two. It is
emerging technology that has many lives saving applications in medical field
and its full potential is yet to be utilized by the physicians and researchers.
It is called bioprinting when it is used in medical arena to print body parts.
You can
print body parts made up of gamut of materials from powdered titanium alloy,
plaster, ceramic and glass to thermoplastic and even photopolymers. The body
parts can be grasped in hands.
It has some
special applications in cardiology, and can be divided into 3 categories. It
allows for printing models of babies with congenital heart diseases, so that
the surgeon is trained before the actual procedure and knows instantly what
operation is to be performed. Customized heart parts that are very near to the
natural body parts can be printed so that replacement surgeries are easy and functional.
It has a huge potential in the field of adult structural heart defects. The
third category is a distant ‘moonshot’-the 3D fabrication of an entire,
implantable replacement heart.
The actual
technology is nearly 30 years old, but has made its way in the medical field
since last 10 years.
Imaging of
the heart model primarily by computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance
imaging is the first step in printing the heart. A 3-D modelling program then
makes a digital file in a computer-aided design (CAD) file. The digital file is
then uploaded to a 3-D printer along with the appropriate raw material and the
object is created layer by layer.
In this
video Dee Dee Wang, M.D., Director, Structural Heart Imaging at Henry Ford
Hospital, Detroit, explains how her center uses 3-D printing and computer aided
design (CAD) software to improve patient outcomes.
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