3d technology guides the treatment of a woman brain tumour

As mentioned in the previous articles, 3D printers have become affordable for the ordinary individuals. People can buy easily 3D printers and/or 3D scanners to build things that fulfill their basic need in their home.

Recently, a man, named Mike Balzer, succeed to use the 3D technology to help treating his wife’s brain tumor. The result is very impressive and the achievement so thrilling. He actually succeeded to 3D model and 3D print the inside of his wife’s head in order to inform the treatment of her condition.

Being not satisfied with the results of the MRI that the doctor made on his wife he used an open source program, InVesalius to generate a 3D medical image. Thus Mike observed an important bulge in his wife head. Therefore after this result, Mike’s wife made a second MRI and the doctor discovered a mass behind her eyes.

Mike created a 3D model of his wife skull that was used by the surgeons when they performed the operation to remove the tumor from her brain.

The other positive outcome from this story is that Mike’s 3D printed skull was used by the Medical Center of the University of Pittsburgh, which had actually performed the operation on his wife, for teaching purposes at the medical school.

It is worth mention it also that Mike Balzer is a co-host of a podcast, ”All Things 3D” that covers many topics on 3D printing.

Sources

http://3dprintingindustry.com/2014/10/25/3d-printing-helps-husband-seek-treatment-for-wifes-brain-tumor/?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=3DPI%2BFacebook 

http://svn.softwarepublico.gov.br/trac/invesalius 

http://allthings3d.net/podcast/

3D Printer revolutionize the Eye Prostheses

Patients who need a prosthetic eye often need to spend huge amounts of money as it is very expensive and not always covered by health insurance. Therefore 3D printing can interfere in this situation as a cheaper and faster way to create a prosthetic eye.

In 2014, during the annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO), researchers presented their findings. They developed a fast and inexpensive way to make facial prostheses for eye cancer patients using facial topographical scanning software and 3D printing.

The procedure works as follows; the patients are scanned on the undamaged side of their face using a mobile scanner. Then a scan is taken of the side of the face with the orbital defect and after that the software program meshes the two scans together to create a 3D image of the face. The topographical information goes to a 3D printer, which translates the data into a mask formed out of “injection-molded rubber suffused with colored pigments” that corresponds the patient skin tone.

This technological advance allows people who cannot afford the traditional prostheses as it is too expensive, to buy one that was 3D printed in no time.

Sources: 

http://3dprintingindustry.com/2014/10/22/3d-scan-eye-prostheses/ 

http://www.aao.org/ 

Low cost 3D printing thanks to "E-nable" and helping those in need

E-nable is a non profit organisation that gathers a group of people who have come together from all over the world to help create and design 3D Printed assistive hand devices for those in need. They create open source designs for mechanical hand assistive devices that can be downloaded and 3D printed for a very affordable price as for instance 50$. Their designs are open source, this means that anyone and anywhere can download and create them.

The E-Nable team use now a new online customization tool, the “Hand-O-Matic”, which generates a 3D printable hand based on the measurements of a given individual. The tool works as follows, you first enter the width across your knuckles and the length of the palm and then you have the “Raptor hand”. Then you can add  several options and finally once the model is completed the site emails the .stl to the customer for 3D printing anywhere. Thanks to E-nable, the practice of 3D printing low-cost prosthetics is growing very fast. This was also put in place through the distributed manufacturing technology and through the Internet that allows which facilitates the sharing of information.

Sources:

http://enablingthefuture.org/

http://3dprintingindustry.com/2014/10/08/e-nable-3d-printed-prosthetics-enabled-youmagines-hand-o-matic/

Adobe updates 3D printing features

Adobe, the well known company focused upon the creation of multimedia and creativity software products just announced new updates for its products,  Photoshop CC, Lightroom Mobile, Lightroom Web, Photoshop Sketch, and Photoshop Mix in order to stimulate and to provide more possibilities in 3D printing.

Users can import animation and rigging data from COLLADA (collaborative design activity) files, and continue to paint, finish or refine 3D objects. COLLADA is an interchange file format for interactive 3D applications and it defines an open standard XML schema for exchanging digital assets among various graphics software applications. You can also leverage the existing animation data and Photoshop Timeline to create promotional videos.

For the moment you can export 3D models to PDF to be reviewed and manipulated in Adobe Acrobat.

These updates will give the opportunity to more customers to use 3D printers and thus accessibility to these innovations will increase. Furthermore there will be an increase in the resources and in the capabilities of these products and thus the users would be able to use them more efficiently. 

Sources

http://inside3dprinting.com/adobe-announces-3d-printing-upgrades-to-photoshop-cc/

http://3dprint.com/17963/adobe-3d-printing-photoshop/

How the 3D scanner works?

In order to 3D print a prototype, there is an important stage to go through. If we don’t have the digital representation of our model we must scan it.

In order to collect the data there are many ways to do it, but two methods stand in the front, the laser scanning and the digitalizing. With the laser scanning, a laser line passes over the surface of an object in order to record three-dimensional information without touching the object. This method is mostly used for scanning organic shapes. On the other hand digitalizing is a contact based form of 3D data collection and works by touching a probe to various points on the surface of the object to record 3D information. The latter method is commonly used for geometric shapes.

In the medical sector 3D scanners are used to capture 3D shape of a patient in for instance orthotics or dentistry. Thus Computer aided design and manufacturing (CAD/CAM) software is used to draw and produce the orthosis, prosthesis or dental implants.

Sources :

http://www.dirdim.com/lm_everything.htm

http://www.3dscanco.com/about/3d-scanning/