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3D Printed Bone Models Cut Cost of Surgery Operations
Tasha26 writes "A trainee surgeon, Mark Frame, has figured out how to save U.K.'s NHS thousands of pounds by taking advantage of 3D-printer technology. Success in orthopedic operations relies on surgeons having an accurate 3D model of the area where the operation will take place. Such models take time to produce and cost up to £1200 ($1915). Mark, a self-confessed 'technology geek,' used open source OsiriX software to convert CT scans into files which are readable by the 3D printers at Shapeways, a company in the Netherlands. Within a week they produced and delivered the first plastic 3D model of a child's forearm at a cost of £77 ($123). Mark has written a free guide so that other surgeons can make their own bones, which is being considered for publication by the World Journal of Science and Technology."
Side note -- if this happened in the US, he would have kept the source closed, founded a company, charged extortionary prices, and the entire medical profession would be worse off at his expense.
Pretty soon here we'll be able to print the fifth element from dna found in a robot bug glove.
No fair! You changed the outcome by measuring it!
He is supposed to patent it and charge up to £1999 for each model.
How do you like this "trinket?"
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
My hat is off to this guy! (All I've done with Osiris-X is look at pretty pictures).
I was kinda hoping that this meant the printer would make the actual replacement part but I guess that's a problem of what kinds of material the printer can use and not of his ingenuity. Unfortunately it'll probably be a while until a human bone replacement can be printed out on a hobbyist printer.
Still great! Nothing beats an actual 3D physical model for per-visualization.
...I could totally see this failing due to privacy legislature relating to patient records.
I guess hospitals should start buying 3D-printers then?
.: Max Romantschuk
This just demonstrates the one niche that 3D printing is good at. We have been using 3D printing for prototyping for years, and they work great for that. You get an object that is good enough for a one-off prototype without the expense of casting or milling. But they are worthless for producing anything that needs to last, or have any sort of structural strength.
"Haters" don't hate 3D printing for what it is good for, they hate the hype surrounding it saying it will revolutionize manufacturing and will quickly improve to the point where home users can make things as good as professional manufacturing can. That's just not going to happen.
That just means the hospital will charge you 150,000 for the surgery instead of 152,000. Very little difference to the american consumer.
After recently having my arm broke in more places than they could count in the xray and then rebuilt with plates and screws I think this is really cool.
it's another option! another tool.
I'm lucky that I got to keep my arm but it could have been the other way around.
Just my .020001 USD from having been there.
Don't worry, any company wanting to do it will need FDA approval for their implementation and then the price will get close to that.
And then if insurance covers it they'll jack up the price further, and there won't be any savings at all.
The company that was selling the replicas for $1900 a piece will probably be queuing up lawyers and paid "experts" very soon to give extremely good reason why the government should pass a law making this illegal.
I don't know how they'll justify it, but what difference does that make? They'll find a way to justify it no matter what.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
Seriously, Shapeways doesn't do anything different from any other 3d-print bureau, except charge a little less for significantly worse service and products run at lower resolutions. They use the same 3d printers that are available all over the place.
The story here is that a 3d printer was used to make a prosthetic bone for a patient. That's freaking cool.
Let the jokes and conspiracy theories begin!
Seriously, I wonder if a built in health monitor could be 'printed' into the bone? Or if stronger materials could be embedded into the normal biologically acceptable material? Carbon nanotube fibers surrounded by self-repairing plastic?
Something that could pick up nervous system signals (if it's a bone it's darn close to them) and using the body as a natural antenna would be interesting. Someone put an iPhone into their artificial arm which was neat but doing something like this to a bone would make updates, er, difficult.
Oooh! Oooh! Quantum computer embedded into skull bone replacement!
How far can you think one can go with this?
Great that it's open source but it's far from revolutionary. Materialise has been doing this for 10+ years. Lots of Orthopaedic companies are selling guides and bone models with this same concept in the US today. Prices vary, of course...
I had this idea a long time ago... I am a complete idiot for not getting off my ass, and off slashdot.
(I was in ortho clinicals at the time)
Hell, if I had done it, i would probably have sold it to Nokia, or some other company with a history of #$%^ing things up
It's really just a timing thing. Orthpods have been doing this for years with varying technologies - he 'just' figured out how to massage the data in Osirex to talk to the Shapeways printers. A neat bit of programming but not, in and of itself, much of a business model.
And to everyone who thinks they are actually making bones with the printers, back off on the Mountain Dew for a minute. They are just making plastic models to help visualize prospective surgeries better. It will be a while before Shapeways is making biological frameworks.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Great that it's open source but this is nothing new. Materialise in Belgium has been doing this for 10+ years; software and printing. Lots of orthopaedic companies in the US even use this to make bone models and even form fitting surgical guides- FDA approved. http://www.materialise.com/orthopaedics, Biomet's Signature , Zimmer's PSI, DePuy TruMatch, Smith and Nephew's Visionaire...seems to work commercially.
we're about two years from the first lawsuits against these printing service for IP violations. Let's say you break a plastic bracket on your ten-year old car and instead of paying say $80 for one from the dealer, you have one reproduced for half that. Oh, There Will Be Blood. Once these 'printing houses' are shut down, the machines themselves will be impossibly expensive as they will have a five-figure cost added on for licensing fees. Once again, the blood-sucking corporations will make sure the future stays uncool.
Just like a comment a couple of days ago, same here:
Technology and innovation and invention causes prices to DROP not to rise and this is true for all fields and medical field is not an exception, however the paradox is in - the prices keep going up.
Again: the reason that prices in western medicine are going up has nothing to do with innovation, technology and invention. Those things do push prices down.
Any pill that prevents a surgery causes prices to go down.
Yet the prices are going up. The reason why prices in health care and health insurance are going up is government money in it. Government creates, supports, subsidizes, promotes, stimulates and bails out monopolies, this is true for all monopolies, including the large pharma.
FDA is standing there not to save you in any way, it's there to create a barrier to entry to any innovator who would otherwise come out with new technology. The innovator wants to make profit. There is plenty of profit to be made in health care and health insurance because there is plenty of things to innovate with. Plenty of new drugs, procedures, tools, instruments, data integration systems, etc.etc., all of this can be built. Most of it is not built, because the cost of entering the field is horrendous.
Who has 500 million dollars to pay for whatever FDA wants and requires? All the the stuff that is being worked on - it has to overcome a major hurdle of sinking half a billion dollars initially, before even starting the sales.
So first you have to spend time and money to create something, you HAVE to make sure it works. But then you have to pay everything that FDA requires for, and this goes into hundreds of millions. If you target a small time problem, where there are maybe a few tens of thousands of cases only to be helped, you are out of luck. You can't make any money, you can't overcome this hurdle of having to sink hundreds of millions of dollars.
-- /. crowd can't seem to comprehend that, and it's funny, because they are capable of understanding at least some of the principle of initial investment. There were all these comments on the few people who make a lot of money by selling iPad and iPhone apps, and some HERE were arguing that it's impossible to turn a profit due to 'high cost of entry', which is 99 dollars.
That's right, they are complaining that they have to sink 99 dollars of investment capital (as if they don't have to spend their actual time, which supposedly is worth more than that to write an app.)
So they understand overcoming the 99 dollar barrier. How come they can't comprehend the difficulties involved in overcoming just the licensing costs of say half a billion (never mind the problems with all other gov't regulations, start with patents and end with drug distribution regulations).
--
This story is good, somebody came out with an innovation. I am sure in FREE market he could make a difference.
You can't handle the truth.
Slicer (http://www.slicer.org, open source) does the same and more than Osirix(mac) on pc/linux. We here at IBUR use the Object printers to print clear and white at the same time. Printing in clear allows you to see more internal structures as well as nerves and roots in white. Doing the full skulls for orthognathic surgery makes for interesting led lit Halloween props( with signed release forms, of course).
www.iburbiosystems.com/newsite/ ( under construction )
That is not news, at least in Brazil. I have been to at least five speeches about the same topic in the last 6 years. By November 2007, five years in development inVesailus software became Free Software, using the CC-GPL license (a non official GPL translation license used in Brazil).
From the Wikipedia article (in portuguese):
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/pt/wiki/InVesalius
"By 2010, the software was already used to build more than 1500 prototype models..."
A 2008 article (in portuguese), showing a prototype picture:
http://cienciaecultura.bvs.br/scielo.php?pid=S0009-67252008000100004&script=sci_arttext
SVN site (in english):
http://svn.softwarepublico.gov.br/trac/invesalius
The high cost isn't associated with any materials costs, it's all labor!
I used to work in a research laboratory that studied hip deformities; as part of our modeling, we had to generate detailed 3-D models of hips from CT scans. The reason for the cost of such models isn't a material cost - it's the labor associated with "segmenting" the CT scan. Resolution is often very poor on CT scans and algorithms simply aren't good enough to create a proper "segmented" 3-D model on the fly; each model required, in our lab, 40-60 hours of manual cleanup and smoothing to create an accurate surface geometry. In other words, all this work would have to be done before the piece could be printed anyway!
The better solution would be for somebody to develop some more intelligent algorithms that are able to automate the segmentation process used to create 3-D models from CT scans.
We should just eliminate the FDA entirely. Then we can save a lot of money because people will just attempt to regrow their bones by drinking oil from snakes as there will be no agency to stop anyone from marketing all medical techniques as 100% proven to work. The free market always works best!
Open source, closed hardware
I love all of the new things I keep hearing that 3D printers are able to create.
Steve Smith has been doing this at the John Radcliffe in Oxford for maybe ten years or more. He's a maxillofacial surgeon, working on difficult facial reconstruction (seriously, these guys get to see some ugly messes - what they do is incredible). He has a 5-axis mill, and some software cobbled together by a former PhD student. He uses CT data to cut out skulls from foam, so he can practice fitting plates to the skull before opening the patient. They also make neat desk ornaments.
while it isn't possible to make actual bones, it is possible to make casts from the models, and make better fitting prosthetic pieces from them.