News3D Printing and Neurosurgery—Ready for Prime Time?
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Creating Models for Surgical Planning, Teaching, and Practicing
Neurosurgeons encounter some of the most complicated anatomic structures of the body. The intricate, sometimes obscure structural relationships between cerebral structures, vessels, cranial nerves, and skull base architecture can be difficult to appreciate fully based solely on radiographic two-dimensional images. Any error in navigating this complicated anatomy has potentially devastating consequences. In addition, the small surgical access field for some neurosurgical cases, especially skull
Creating Prosthetics for Implantation
In medicine, one of the most obvious uses for 3D printing technology is the use of high-definition computed tomography scans to produce customized bone prosthetics. The manufacturer Oxford Performance Materials (South Windsor, Connecticut, USA) more recently received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration http://www.technewsdaily.com/16931-bionic-eye-sight-blind.html for a polyethylethylketone skull implant, which led to its first successful implantation in March 2013 (Figure 2 ).
Tissue Engineering for Transplantation
Probably the most advanced and complicated use of 3D printing technology is engineering inert scaffolds for biologic ingrowth in vivo for transplantation. Spine surgery is at the forefront of this field because 3D bioprinting has been used experimentally to create intervertebral disks for possible disk replacement. Whatley et al. (3) produced polymer scaffold structures using degradable polyurethane to mimic the elastic nature of the native intervertebral disk tissue. The material was deposited
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Complex heterogeneous tissue constructs containing multiple cell types prepared by inkjet printing technology
Biomaterials
(2013)