An 83 year old Belgian lady received the world’s first jaw transplant – made on a 3D printer which created it out of Titanium. 3D printing is going to open up a whole new and better world for the people needing such appliances. While it’s slightly heavier than the original, it should provide a ‘perfect’ replacement. It also should significantly reduce surgery time because of that. Today, replacements have to be ‘fitted’ during surgery. For heart and aged patients this is a fantastic benefit, as well as for others as the heart depressive effects of anesthesia will be significantly lessened. Needless to say, it will decrease the risk of infection as well as cost.
“The operation to attach the synthetic jawbone took just four hours, about a fifth of the time required for traditional reconstructive surgery. Shortly after waking up from the operation, the woman could speak. A day later, she could swallow again….The titanium implant was built by LayerWise, a 3D printing firm in Leuven, Belgium that specializes in titanium dental and bone implants. A 3D printer heated and fused tiny titanium particles together, layer-by-layer, to re-create the shape of the woman's jaw. Printing the implant took just a few hours.”
"You can build parts that you can't create using any other technique. For example you can print porous titanium structures which allow bone in-growth and allow a better fixation of the implant, giving it a longer lifetime." - Jules Poukens from Hasselt University in Belgium, who led the surgical team, told BBC News. – PC Magazine
Here’s a picture of it:
Photocredit: PC Magazine
Source:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2399887,00.asp