Medical

Medical Devices
As mentioned, one of the most successful applications for rapid manufacturing has been its application to the production of customized hearing aids. If there ever was an ideal application for rapid manufacturing, this is it. Every ear is different, and the size of the parts makes it possible to fabricate the products in large, economical batches with existing equipment. In addition to the obvious variable geometry advantages, it turns out there are other benefits provided by additive fabrication. These include the ability to add textures or to make a removable ear piece. The latter can result in major savings for a family with a growing child who needs a hearing aid. Only a new shell to house the same electronics need be fabricated instead of periodically requiring an entire new instrument.

   

Surgical guides, such as splints to align a patient's jaws during an operation, have been an important application area for rapid prototyping for years. The ability to fabricate geometrically complex items is now leading to other applications in operating rooms and other clinical settings, such as an impeller for a blood pump and patient positioning fixtures. The impeller's blades are specially-designed to prevent damage to cells The positioners can be designed to hold specific patients in very accurate registration for radiation therapy or for repeated scanner measurements using CT or MRI, for example.

Complex radiation-shaping arrays within such scanning equipment are also good candidates for fabrication by rapid manufacturing. Several commercial and academic organizations have described such applications. Among other things, additive fabrication may be used to produce scintillator arrays in dedicated PET scanners for breast cancer detection and to fabricate stray radiation grids for X-ray detector arrays.

    

Rapid manufacturing also may become an important 3-dimensional communication medium in the medical world. Rare and important pathological specimens can be reproduced and distributed as models to the larger medical community while preserving original collections. Tactile images for blind and visually impaired people can be produced using a number additive technologies. There is not only the possibility of significantly lowering the costs of such materials, but also providing complex pictures and charts easily, and making reading matter quickly available to that community.