Shapeways serves up prêt-à-imprimer 3D bones, Lagerfeld stands by for full skeletal replacement

3D printed chocolates ? Sure, sounds innocuous enough. But made-to-order 3D printed bones? Now, that’s just morbid. For the surgical team at Glasgow’s Royal Hospital for Sick Children, however, the tech’s come in handy as a budget-priced, pre-operative planning tool. Mark Frame, an orthopedic surgical trainee at RHSC, first came up with the idea to create the osteo-facsimiles after a costly university-made replica, commissioned for a procedure, failed to meet necessary proportion and size requirements. After undertaking a bit of self-assigned internet research, Frame sorted out a method to create renders of a patient’s fractured forearm using CT scans processed via the open source OsiriX software . These were then passed through a separate MeshLab application to tidy up any artifacting, and finally exported in 3D-compatible .stl format. The resulting files were sent to Shapeways for printing , with the white plastic bone copies delivered just seven days later for

Posted by on September 17, 2011. Filed under News, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.