Medical 3D printing in orthopedics
3D printing has been around for a while now with many 3D printers being readily available for purchase. More recently, 3D printing has been making waves in healthcare, specifically in orthopedics with Invisaid taking the lead to improve accessibility and ease.
Abdul
I’ve personally owned a 3D printer for several years. I purchased my first one at university. At the time, I was exploring the field of robotics and was in the process of developing a robotic dog, quite literally, my version of Boston Dynamics’ Spot. Deciding what 3D printer to buy was straightforward. There are a plethora of YouTube videos out there comparing the various models available on the market. I ended up purchasing a Prusa 3D printer simply because the brand was repeatedly praised as the “Toyota of 3D printers” due to its reliability. It arrived semi-assembled and I spent around an hour putting it together whilst following a YouTube tutorial.
3D printing works by layering filament material repeatedly on top of itself to add depth and create a three-dimensional object. All 3D printers require movement in the X, Y, and Z axes. If you’re brain is wired like mine, then you’re likely thinking that this equates to between four and six stepper motors, ignoring any excessive engineering tricks that could lower this.
You’ll need filament material to print with and this is extremely important to consider when it comes to medical 3D printing. There’s a lot of information out there comparing filaments, some of this conflicting with some of my own conclusions based on my own experiences with 3D printing. At the time, I was extremely fortunate to be able to fund this hobby significantly beyond the bare minimum and I went out of my way to purchase various filaments. In fact, one of my most bizarre filament purchases included an iron-filled composite PLA which was attractive for its ferromagnetic properties (this was a total game-changer when you’re attempting to 3D print your own stepper motors and need to exploit any gain you can get). Summarizing what I’ve learnt about filaments over the years would require an entire blog post on it’s own however there are benefits in purchasing higher quality filaments as long as you’re able to store and utilize them correctly. The most common filament material is PLA, but I’ve always opted for PETG which is far superior in terms of strength and durability. PETG is still prone to stringing and it can be difficult to print with when working on extremely detailed models. Despite the cation, I’ve always found a way to make it work through tweaking my models and print settings.
Fortunately for our users, Invisaid’s rapidly developing codebase, particularly the 3D printing logic, is designed to do almost all the heavy lifting. This means that our users can focus on their surgical plans and not stress about the technicalities of 3D printing.