3D printers may well be on the path to providing products to us faster than ever, but an Australian company is on track to deliver 3D printed body parts to help surgeons better prepare for the big day.
The next time you need a part of skeleton worked on, there’s a good chance that your local physician will have been able to test what they will need to do by practicing on a recreated version of your bones.
They’ll get this opportunity in part due to the work of an Australian company, 3D Medical, which has sent word that it is now working with a Canadian company that builds the software radiologists use to get x-rays of your body.
This might be all just a bunch of mumbo jumbo to you, but the easy way of explaining it is that a radiologist can take a scan of your knee, jaw, or skull, and order a 3D printed model of that part, allowing the doctor to analyse what’s going on in your body using a 3D example.
According to the people we spoke to about this, these 3D examples will only be used for diagnostic purposes, with only one such example ever implanted into a real person after extensive research and testing beforehand.
The materials used here are made from hardened plastic as well as titanium, though, so while these would be good for finding out just what is wrong with someone, even the possibility of implants is a good one.
