Role of the orthopaedic surgeon in 3D printing: current applications and legal issues for a personalized medicine

Fused deposition modelling: Current status, methodology, applications and future prospects

“…Biomedicine FDM using filaments made of biocompatible polymers often show good mechanical performance and structural integrity making them suitable for broad a range of biomedical applications [230]. As such FDM has enabled numerous advances in medicine, especially in personalized medicine, where it has made possible customized treatments, prostheses, insoles and implants [2,124,145,217,218]. FDM is also ideal for manufacturing scaffolds that can act as an artificial extracellular matrix (ECM) in tissue engineering applications (Figure 4).…”

Fused Deposition Modeling of Polyolefins: Challenges and Opportunities

“…FDM 3D-printing technology is rapidly utilized in biomedical engineering and in the fabrication of patient's specified and personalized implants which is used further as prosthetics, joints, bones, and insoles. [49,[195][196][197] PP could be a potential material to work for splinter material as shown in Figure 15a, which is an example of a 3D-printed PP leg that surely helps in the medical industry. Apart from the processing of scaffolds, control of the porosity and internal architectural interconnected network are the two important conditions that need to be fulfilled.…”

3D shape measurement techniques for human body reconstruction

“…In the past, customization has often been sacrificed in favour of manufacturability, however, with the advent of 3D printing [1], this shortcoming is being overcome [2], [3], and more and more emphasis is being given to the necessity of providing fast and accurate systems to obtain the geometry of the whole body [4], [5], [6] or of specific body segments [7]. Traditional techniques are based on plaster moulds and are affected by some major limitations such as: the invasiveness, the need to keep the patient still for the curing time [8], a limited accuracy (over 15 mm, according to [9], [10]), and the impossibility of acquiring undercut geometries. More recently, and as a viable alternative, various non-contact instruments have been developed in order to perform digital scanning [11], [12], [13] and the respective performances have been extensively reported in literature [14], [15].…”

“…The accuracy and correlation among the geometries reconstructed with different visual devices, are evaluated and discussed, and the bias given by a non-collaborative patient is illustrated, leading to introduce a new methodology based on a multimodal approach, whose benefits are outlined and quantified. In Section 6, it is demonstrated how this methodology can be applied in orthopaedics [1], [8], [11], and on least collaborative patients, making it possible to obtain body scans where the alternative approach based on plaster of Paris moulds would fail or would result in lower accuracy and longer execution times.…”