Prototyping a new skull.
One such medical application was to help a 12-year-old boy who lost part of his cranium in an accident and needed reconstructive surgery on his head. “The great challenge of this case was to design a new skull that could adjust to the child’s growth, year after year,” says DT3D researcher Peter Yoshito Noritomi. This requirement made this medical case even more critical. “If we used a conventional prosthesis in this cranioplasty, the device could be rejected because of the growth of the patient’s head; another risk would be the deformation of the skull.” The DT3D team used FDM technology to 3D print the prototypes, which allowed it to work with very durable materials. “Those materials helped us to create models that, later, would be copied, helping with the creation of the actual prosthesis, in bio-compatible material,” explains Noritomi. Cases that demand surgery planning, on the other hand, usually are based on other models and developed with the Connex 3D Printer, which DT3D acquired through an agreement with the Ministry of Health. “This machine is particularly suited for high-accuracy applications. This printer can generate layers of two hundredths of a millimeter,” says Noritomi.
The Connex 3D Printer is ideal for medical applications that require prototypes of soft anatomical structures such as arteries and nerves. “Depending on the material used, we can print more flexible objects.” An essential component of CTI’s medical applications is the InVesalius software, developed in the institute’s labouratories. In Vesalius can be downloaded for free at www.cti.gov.br/invesalius.
It is an open-source platform for reconstruction, in 3D format, of 2D images generated in studies made with computed tomography or magnetic resonance equipment. The centre of a global community of researchers and users, and fully developed as an open platform, In Vesalius has been translated into 10 languages and is used in 100 countries by 10,000 people.
