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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.
He is supposed to patent it and charge up to £1999 for each model.
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.
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.
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).
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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.