Disruptive knowledge about 3D printing to transform healthcare
We at Voxeled Materials strongly believe that knowledge is the key resource to empower the today´s healthcare professionals in transforming by leaps the solutions for the pains our global society is suffering. The solutions are there! All we need to know is how to use them. 3D Printing is a disruptive technology that has emerged as a transforming element at every industrial sector. Specially healthcare is an activity sector that can benefit from the use of this technology in several dimensions.
Next October and November 2016 we will be offering a course where we want to share our experienced knowledge about 3D Printing technologies with the participants as a means to empower their knowledge. At the end the participants will be able of developing new applications as well as new real cases of application within their influence´s circle at the healthcare sector. You can download the registration information by clicking HERE
We want to share the overview of the most valuable applications developed until now, considering that still there is a vast field of invention with this techniques that will be fostered definitively by the final users at the healthcare sector, say the surgeons, the patients and all the value chain involved in the development of medical devices.
Tissue printing
Even when thousands of drugs have been able to relieve many of the conditions affecting our body during illnesses, the case is that when an organ has a definite functional fault on its function, the only viable solution is usually organ transplant. Some specific severe failures such as heart attacks, strokes, burns or severe trauma, impact the function of organs, often affect their integrity leaving behind an organ or tissue with reduced or no functionality. In these cases, a viable solution is called biological therapy consisting of the growth of cultured cells to be reimplanted into the affected organ. The intention is that the patient´s body itself take care of integrating the new colony of cells and restoring the functions of the injured organ.
Implants printing
Sometimes there are whole pieces of tissue destroyed for various reasons and become irreplaceable. These reasons may be malignant tumors, trauma, infections or autoimmune degeneration. In these cases, when the amount of lost tissue is notorious there is no choice but to remove damaged tissue, leaving an empty space that must be filled out physically. For this purpose for decades physicians have been using implants made of different materials according to their final destination. The improvement involving the use of 3D Printing relates to the possibility of making tailored implants with increasingly biomimetic, bioactive and biocompatible materials.
Ergonomics for surgery tools
The exercise of surgical practice has benefited from the advances in manufacturing to the point where one could say that the better tools existing in manufacturing, the greater maneuverability in surgery as a result of the use of better surgical tools. 3D printing as a manufacturing method allows a unique geometric freedom, with comparatively very competitive prices with traditional methods of fabrication, providing new possibilities for creating tools whose only limit is the imagination of designers and surgeons.
Visualization through tactile models
The experience of practicing a surgery to a patient, it has always been a complex task, threatening to some degree the patient's life. To make a skull implant to a patient who has suffered a head injury, the surgery team formerly had the double function during the operation to study the injury, and to design and produce the implant plate to replace the damaged bone tissue. By using modern images processing techniques and tactile models to understand and to evaluate the severity of injuries in advance, surgeons can have an experience of more rational surgical planning while surgical resources are optimized in terms of time, money, safety and results.
In the course that we will dictate in October and November 2016 the technical details of this solutions will be shown as well as their scope, as you can read in the course´s brochure. You can download it by clicking HERE