A functional methodology on the manufacturing of customized polymeric cranial prostheses from CAT using SPIF

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to propose a functional methodology to produce cranial prostheses in polymeric sheet. Within the scope of rapid prototyping technologies, the single-point incremental forming (SPIF) process is used to demonstrate its capabilities to perform customized medical parts. Design/methodology/approach The methodology starts processing a patient’s computerized axial tomography (CAT) and follows with a computer-aided design and manufacture (CAD/CAM) procedure, which finally permits the successful manufacturing of a customized prosthesis for a specific cranial area. Findings The formability of a series of polymeric sheets is determined and the most restrictive material among them is selected for the fabrication of a specific partial cranial prosthesis following the required geometry. The final strain state at the outer surface of the prosthesis is analysed, showing the high potential of SPIF in manufacturing individualized cranial prostheses from polymeric sheet. Originality/value This paper proposes a complete methodology to design and manufacture polymer customized cranial prostheses from patients’ CATs using the novel SPIF technology. This is an application of a new class of materials to the manufacturing of medical prostheses by SPIF, which to this purpose has been mainly making use of metallic materials so far. Despite the use of polymers to this application is still to be validated from a medical point of view, transparent prostheses can already be of great interest in medical or engineering schools for teaching and research purposes.

Revisiting Formability and Failure of AISI304 Sheets in SPIF: Experimental Approach and Numerical Validation

“…In addition, it must be pointed out that some tested specimens were cut perpendicularly to the crack and the thickness was measured from a profile view in order to validate the previous thickness measurements along the crack. This methodology for determining the strains at fracture is based on the work of Atkins [15] and has been successfully used by the authors in recent research work for measuring fracture strains in forming of sheet metal [10], polymeric sheets [16,17], or even other processes such as tube-end forming [18]. Figure 2 depicts the forming limit diagram of the AISI 304-H111 sheets including bending effects.…”

On the Analysis of the Contact Conditions in Temporomandibular Joint Prostheses

“…In general, in what concerns the analysis, design, and/or manufacturing of medical devices, a precise methodology must be established. Indeed, the previous work of the authors has dealt with this issue [8,22] proposing well-defined road maps including every possible flow of materials, processes, and information.…”

“…Besides, there are a variety of reasons promoting the intensive use of prostheses nowadays including the earlier diagnosis of diseases, the greater rate of success in surgical procedures, the higher longevity of the population, a demand for better quality of life, and the more active lifestyles, among others. As a consequence, for the last few decades, the scientific community and industrial companies have been focusing on the study and development of a new kind of prosthesis [1] especially for bones and their joints [2,3], mainly based on the use of groundbreaking manufacturing technologies such as additive manufacturing [4,5] or other innovative machining technologies [6] and forming processes [7][8][9].…”

Incremental sheet forming of thermoplastics: a review

“…Recently, most researchers investigated ISF of PVC thermoplastics with consideration of the basic process mechanism [22,[29][30][31][32][33][34]. In addition, considerable interest has been made to ISF of thermoplastic materials especially for such as customised cranial implant applications [35][36][37][38][39]. Centeno et al [35] put forward a functional methodology to manufacture cranial implants by using ISF of thermoplastic sheet although there have been extensive reports on using ISF to design and manufacture cranioplasty implants of titanium sheets [40][41][42][43] as the ISF-based cranioplasty implant processing gives an excellent demonstration of the aforementioned advantages in manufacturing customised parts for medical applications.…”