There are many applications that 3D Printing has in everyday life, but one of the ones we are most proud of at Additium3D is when our manufacturing means allow us to participate in medical projects to help the health of others.
It is therefore no mystery that one of the jobs we are most proud of is to have collaborated to help the surgical team of the Hospital Universitario de La Fe in Valencia, in the operation to solve the hip dislocation suffered by Edu.
Many parts of our team were involved in order to convert a simple .DICOM file, extracted from an MRI, into a printed object. All with the aim that the surgeons would be able to palpate and study the area to be operated on live.
What did the client demand of us?
Edu's father came to us through a personal friend of his who happens to be one of Additium3D's most loyal customers and suppliers. His problem was that La Fe was not prepared to do this type of work, but the surgeon felt it was important to be able to study the area to be operated on in person due to the delicacy of the operation.
Therefore, after contacting José Luís, specialist in Additive Manufacturing in the Levante area of the Solitium group, he ended up asking us for help both in the creation of the model from the patient's scanned data, and in the 3D printing of this model for its final objective: to be studied by surgeons.
How did Additium3D deal with the customer's demands?
The question was not only about printing, but also about how to convert the .DICOM file extracted from the patient's tests into a clean file so that they could print correctly and without noise or defects. They had been doing tests on their own, but they were not able to extract the clean information, and that's when they ended up at Additium3D.
On the other hand, the other issue to deal with consisted of the right choice of printing technology and material to capture it in such a way that the doctors could handle it well. In this case, we had it clear from the very first moment, since it was the whole set of bones of the human lower body: coccyx, pubis, sacrum, hip, head of the humerus... They were very complex shapes that only with SLS Technology, taking advantage of its great advantage of not needing supports for printing, we could aspire to do correctly. The material Nylon 12, to be able to offer the most competitive price with this technology, as well as very good resistance and finish.
How did the Additium3D design team create the model to be printed?
Our previous experience working with .DICOM was not very extensive, but we have often worked with 4D ultrasound clinics that offer parents replicas of their babies before birth. The volume of data was much larger in the case of an MRI, but the way of working was very similar, so after several tests we were able to find the desired result.
For these cases, the Slicer software is the most convenient option, as it is designed to work precisely with this type of data. It is a very simple tool to use after some tutorials and with which you can manipulate to eliminate the noise that these tests usually generate. In this way, you can make up by softening the shapes and bringing them closer to reality, while maintaining the dimensions and shapes that the client is really looking for.
In all scientific fields, patience and care are essential to achieve good results, but when it comes to working with .DICOM and Slicer files, this reality must be taken to the extreme to achieve the desired result. And with a lot of patience and a lot of work smoothing shapes, we were able to obtain a model with a maximum degree of approximation to reality.
How did the Additium3D manufacturing team print the model?
As previously explained, from the very beginning it was clear to us that the best option for this type of printing was SLS Technology. This manufacturing method, which is based on the fusion of a bed of powder by the action of a laser, allows printing without supports, with the unsintered powder cube itself being the support.
This was perfect, as doing it in filament was very inconvenient both for the supports that would be necessary and for the finish that would be achieved. And in the case of resin, the price for these sizes and the need for supports made it a very unsuitable option.
Nylon 12 is the material par excellence that we work with at SLS, and for this case it was perfect as it offered us the resistance that the need to handle it required. Therefore, with the help of our FUSE 1 team from Formlabs, we first printed 1 small test, to certify that it was appropriate and what they were looking for. And then 2 sets, one in pieces (separate the heads of the humerus from the larger body) and another on a smaller scale in which everything was printed together.
The reason for this was to satisfy the two objectives of the surgeons:
- In the case of the full-scale impression in parts, the doctors could see how the concavities and the head of the humeri were and could analyse how the dislocated hip had to move into place.
- In the case of the smaller scale joint impression, the doctors assessed the actual position of the head of the dislocated humerus and, on the other hand, the correct position of the correctly positioned humerus.
The fact that the operation was to be performed on a child, and therefore its size was not very large, meant that in 2 impressions it was possible to make the impression of the two desired sets.
Conclusion:
3D printing is becoming part of our lives in more and more areas, and one of the areas where it has the greatest potential is in helping medical teams to perform surgery before it is actually performed.
Additium3D as an integral 3D manufacturing solution has experience in different projects related to the medical field. Proof of this is the case that ended with success both in the modelling from a .DICOM file obtained after an MRI of the patient, and the subsequent 3D printing in Nylon 12 taking advantage of the possibility of printing without support offered by SLS Technology.
