Gabe Linke has been in the imaging profession for over 10 years as a technologist in MRI. He received his Bachelors in Radiation Sciences from the University of Nebraska Medical Center. 2 years ago he became the Cardiac Imaging & 3D Printing Coordinator for Children’s Hospital and Medical Center in Omaha Nebraska. His original duties involved overseeing Cardiac CT and MRI and starting their 3D printing program. This program started with 3D printing cardiac models for presurgical planning. It has since grown outside of cardiology and is hospital-wide serving multiple subspecialties with presurgical planning, educational modeling, and numerous research applications. Gabe will also be a speaker for our upcoming 3DHEALS OMAHA: AdvancedTek, Healthcare 3D Printing event.

Jenny: When was the first encounter you had with 3D printing? What was that experience like? What were you thinking at that moment?

Gabe: I experienced 3D printing for the first time when I accepted my position at Omaha Children’s Hospital. I was in my second interview for a cardiac imaging coordinator position and Dr. Scott Fletcher handed me a printed heart from a case they had done.  It blew me away to hold the replica of the child’s heart in my hand and I immediately could see the potential this technology would have to impact healthcare.

Jenny: What inspired you to start your journey in 3D printing (bio-fabrication/bio-printing)?

Gabe: After accepting the job at Omaha Children’s I was shown the printer that we had received as a gift to start our own in-house 3D printing program. The program started in Cardiology, but as I saw the way these 3D Models impacted the way our Cardio-thoracic surgeons I knew we had to do more. Seeing the impact in the first few cases inspired me to go to my directors and expand the program to a hospital-wide 3D printing service.

Jenny: Who inspired you the most along this journey in 3D printing (bio-printing/bio-fabrication)? This can be a mentor, a patient, a celebrity, anyone basically. You can name more than one as well.

Gabe: I think I would have to say Dr. Scott Fletcher after my answer earlier right? Scott gave me the gift of this job and I will forever be grateful to him. He has taught me so much about congenital cardiology and has supported me every step of the way as this program continues to grow.

Dr. Jorge Zuniga has taught me so much about the technology of 3D printing and the global impact we can have using this technology together. I very early on adopted his vision for open collaboration is paramount in a successful program. I am honored to call him a personal friend and colleague.

Jenny: What motivates you the most for your work?

Gabe: Our patients, period. I joined the medical profession for one reason and that was to help people. Seeing a child set down an iPad to better understand why he’s having an operation, hearing a surgeon speak on how they did a better procedure or operation due to a 3D model, or hearing how much better a nurse can do her job because she was handed a 3D model of a patient’s heart. All of these are helping a patient through one means or another to have better care.

Jenny: What is/are the biggest obstacle(s) in your line of work? If you have conquered them, what were your solutions?

Gabe: One of the biggest obstacles, was growing our program outside of Cardiology. My solution was easy:  Dr. Lincoln Wong. Dr. Wong, one of our radiologists, adopted this technology and showed it to everyone. He would be reading a case and see where the application could help a surgeon and would have a model made. He would take these models to the surgeons and that was it. Our hospital now prints for multiple subspecialties and we continue to grow. Dr. Wong’s passion for 3D printing has been paramount in the expansion of our program.

Jenny: What do you think is (are) the biggest challenge(s) in 3D Printing/bio-printing? What do you think the potential solution(s) is (are)?

Gabe: I have to admit that I have to answer this from a perspective that I do not personally know. Omaha Children’s has been very supportive of its 3D Printing Program, but in general, I think that funding for these programs is the biggest challenge. This will take care of itself in time, as I believe that reimbursement is inevitable based on the positive impacts 3D models are having on patient care.

Jenny: If you are granted three wishes by a higher being, what would they be?

Gabe:

1. A life full of love: it is the single most powerful thing in the universe and can overcome anything put in its way.
2. The cure for mental illness/addiction.
3. The Flashes Speed ( had to lighten the mood a little)

Jenny: What advice would you give to a smart driven college student in the “real world”? What bad advice you heard should they ignore?

Gabe: Find something that you’re passionate about and you enjoy doing and figure out how to turn it into your job.

Bad advice: Do a job just for the money.

The post Interview: Gabe Linke, 3D Printing Coordinator, Omaha Children’s Hospital 🗓 appeared first on 3DHeals.

Ellie O’Brien serves as the Innovations Lab Manager and Design Engineer for Northwestern Simulation, a part of Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. In this role, she combines design thinking with engineering to focus on modeling, prototyping, and production. She creates and produces medical training devices using state-of-the-art materials and techniques, including modern polymers, 3D printing, and Computer-Aided Design (CAD); and she collaborates closely with faculty members across the medical school to respond to pressing needs in medical education. Ellie will be one of the speakers at our Chicago event. 
 

Jenny: What inspired you to use 3D printing for your work?

Ellie: I first started exploring 3D printing in high school. I was on an engineering course called Advanced Competitive Science and we used SolidWorks to design parts for a robot and 3D print them. I found it so cool to be able to build something from scratch in 3D and then watch it come to life in the printer!

When I first started in my role at the Innovations Lab, there was some use of 3D printing for the design of simulation models — we would design and print parts or 3D print molds for silicone casting. But what has been most inspiring is being able to use real patient data to create simulation models that are very lifelike and incredibly realistic.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Jenny: What is the biggest motivation for your work?

Ellie: I am motivated daily by my work because I get to see physicians using the models that I designed and 3D printed to practice procedures and techniques in a safe space. I am able to actually see and know that the models I am designing are making people better physicians, and hopefully, improving patient outcomes.

Jenny: What is the biggest challenge in your work?

Ellie: The biggest challenge in my work is making models that are as lifelike as possible while achieving our educational outcomes. My clients always want their simulations models to look and feel exactly like the real thing; but many times, having a model with freckles and hair does not help them reach their educational outcomes. We have to work together to determine what their educational outcomes and goals are and then design the simulation models with the components necessary to reach those outcomes.

Jenny: What is your vision on the potential impact of your current work to the future of medicine?

Ellie: I believe that the work that we do at Northwestern Simulation and the Innovations Lab is already having an impact on the future of medicine. We are no longer in the era of “See one. Do one. Teach one.” Instead, we taking the learning curve out of the patient room and into our lab where physicians can practice and perfect their skills before encountering a patient.

Jenny: What are you passionate about?

Ellie: My biggest passion — both present in my work and life outside of work — is helping people. I love being able to create something to make someone else’s life better.

Jenny: What do you enjoy in your spare time?

Ellie: I love to cook! And to eat. Chicago has an incredible food scene and my husband and I take full advantage of that. Plus eating meals cooked by others helps me be more creative in the kitchen.

The post Interview: Ellie O'Brien appeared first on 3DHeals.

Neonatal aspirator, the winning design from the 3DHEALS and Voices of Africa hackathon by Kyle Gaiser

In a time of customization to match our personal needs, why do we continue to use the healthcare technologies designed for adults on newborns? The NeoDesign focus group, organized by the Division of Neonatology at the Stanford Children’s Hospital, meets monthly and aims to change this. The event on May 15th, 2017 was hosted by Dr. Vinod Bhutani and Dr. William D Rhine.

The goals of the group are to better understand and incorporate “design thinking” into clinical workflow and innovation efforts, as well as recognize the clinical, business, and ethical hurdles to testing and implementing devices and technology into neonatal care. The take home-points from this conference are valuable to everyone who wants to innovate in healthcare anywhere in the world. In fact, many of the issues addressed during the conference were encountered during our (3DHEALS) collaborative hackathon with Voice of Africa Foundation very recently in designing a neonatal aspirator. (We will report on this later.)

There are three main take-home points:

1. Idea generation

Finding a use case before making the device!

Too often a device or software is created and it is only after this that the search is on for a use and how it can be integrated into the current standard of care. Connection forum(s) are necessary to bring nurses, clinicians, and engineers together to identify and solve problems. Even better is having engineers actually go and see what the doctors and nurses are doing in their practice. In this way, everyone can see what is being done and understand the real problems.

In addition to the NeoDesign group, the Biodesign program at Stanford (represented at this meeting by Dr. James Wall) is another trying to bridge this gap. They help create teams of engineers, clinicians, and industry partners in addition to teaching them to manage innovation teams. One example of how they do this is by bringing a psychologist to speak with the teams to help create a common language between the different disciplines.
      2. Funding the idea

The NIH has a budget in 4 month increments, which makes it hard to predict funding in the future. The Coulter centre and NSF were identified by panelists as other potential sources of grants and funding. These are all possible opportunities but a love of your work and an internal desire to create a better healthcare system are necessary to succeed.

I spoke with one clinician, Regine Marie Fortunov, MD at Baylor College of Medicine, whose goal was to create a new neonatal resuscitation documentation software. To accomplish this, she learned to code in-between putting her kids to bed and her own midnight bedtime. Then she would wake at 6 to get the kids to school and head back to the hospital. In the hospital, in addition to her own work, she gathered feedback on the app from nurses and other clinicians. She couldn’t outsource the coding aspect because funding wasn’t available. A positive spin to the fact that the coding was done by herself, meant that feedback could be instantly integrated for a new update. After six months of hard work, she is now partnering with other hospitals and hoping to develop the software for widespread adoption. This is just one example of how a project first needs the investment from the individual.
      3. The testing hurdles

Demonstrating safety is the minimum entry test into the healthcare system. There are regulatory trials to show safety, and clinical trials to prove that the device or software is actually useful. These trials are sometimes overlapping but is not always the case. The NIH panelist during the conference gave a heads up that the NIH will be revamping how they are doing and accepting clinical trials in the future, including the quality of clinical trials. For both safety and efficacy studies, it is suggested to have composite (and/or many) different endpoints so as to better define the difference that introducing the device or technology has on the current standard of care.

In an evidence-based system, data demonstrating the usefulness of new devices and software is paramount to approval for use. A lack of studies using, and benefiting from, the new technology is therefore just as large a hurdle as demonstrating safety. A proposed solution is greater communication and connections between academia, hospitals, and manufacturers to create evidence of efficacy. In other words, a meeting of the minds on validation and development.

Finally, throughout the innovation process, involvement of patients and parents should not to be forgotten. They are often the key drivers to push for change and innovations, at the same time, acting as great advocates and potential sources of funding.

The post From Design to Product: Some Take-Home Points after Recent Stanford NeoDesign Focus Group Conference appeared first on 3DHeals.

— How Close are We to Artificial Tissues and Organs?

May 3–5, 2017, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Often, whenever people hear the term “healthcare 3D printing”, a common response from them is, “yes, I saw that on the news, are we really printing kidneys?” Although the field of healthcare 3d printing includes a much wider range of healthcare applications using 3D printing (or additive manufacture) technologies, what 3D bioprinting can do (or not do) has been a mystery to many. A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to find out myself during the first “Printing the Future of Therapeutics in 3D” conference, in Vancouver, Canada.

The conference lasts three days, and was co-hosted by Dr. Christian Naus from University of British Columbia, and CEO of Aspect Biosystems, Tamer Mohamed. The event gathered many leading scientists in the field, including MIT, Harvard, UBC, UW, among others. A few commercial representatives were also present, including Aspect Biosystems, Biobots, GSK, and of course, a few lawyers.

I had a chance to join on last day of the conference. There was no theatric display of new technologies, but plenty of in-depth scientific presentations and intimate networking and discussions. It was reassuring to see an elite line up of speakers because some questions will be answered, and if there is no answer, at least an honest “I don’t know”.

What are 3D bioprinting scientists working on?

• • Generate 3D complex disease model such as spinal neural tissues (Dr. Stephainie Willerth’s work), brain glioma model (Wun Chey Sin’s work). One can think of these as the “Rapid Prototyping” of a disease using 3D printing.

• Tissue engineering for tissue replacement, for example, musculoskeletal tissue (Dr. Grainne Cunnifee). One can think of this moving from RP to “production” level of bioprinting.

By the way, none of these is used on actual human.

What is the connection between 3D Printing and bioprinting?

– Both processes use the concept of additive manufacture, which means a digitally controlled manufacture process by adding layers of materials one on top of another to eventually create a 3D object. In the case of bioprinting, the material is often biocompatible materials laced with cellular components. Similar to regular 3D printing, bioprinting also uses common processes like FDM, or SLA. However, because the end goal of bioprinting is to produce a living piece of tissue, modifcations are needed to create the type of biocompatible structures.

– Some updates in bioprinting techniques include:

o New SLA bioprinting technique that uses visible light spectrum (rather than UV light) by Dr. Keekyoung Kim

o New microfluidics-enabled bioprinter that promises high throughput 3D bioprinting option by Dr. Axel Guenther.

o New SLA printing technology for making lab-on-a-chip by Dr. Albert Folch.

Microfluidic Art by FolchLab

How long before we can see an organ 3D printed?

Needless to say, the implication of 3D printing implantable human organs not only means millions of lives saved or improved, it also means a complete disruption of the trillion-dollar healthcare industry. Transplant or not, having a replacement tissue or organ will completely disrupt the supply chain of healthcare. The only problem is that, we are NOT there yet. FDA regulation is a foreseeable challenge to synthetic organs, but there is currently no engineered tissue used for treatment purpose in human body. Researchers and CEOs alike are reluctant in answering when we will have a true human tissue replacement. However, what is in the immediate horizon is a potentially scalable industry focusing on how to improve current therapeutic R&D pipeline with advanced technologies like bioprinting. However, even establishing value of bioprinting as a more effective disease model for pharma R&D is still in early stage, said Dr. Claire Jeong from GSK. At the end of the day, it will require a collaborative effort between academia and industry to fund, develop, and fully commercialize the technology for a scalable solution. One of the most important recent progress is the establishment of IQ Consortium, where the pharma companies provide a guideline for startups and academia for product development. It is worth a look.

Remembering how hard it was for 3DHEALS to find the bioprinting community two years ago when we just started, it is very exciting to me personally to see the community is finally taking shape. Most importantly, I saw a real bioprinter in action for the first time in my life.

The post 3D Bioprinting: Truth is Beautiful appeared first on 3DHeals.

By Eric Barnes, AuntMinnie.com staff writer

This article was originally published on AuntMinnie.com on April 21st, 2017.

VC Panelists @ Startup Pitch Competition, 3DHEALS2017, San Francisco

April 21, 2017 — SAN FRANCISCO – Start-ups are hard enough in any field, but medical device start-ups — including 3D printing hopefuls — require extra helpings of dedication and persistence to succeed, according to experts speaking April 20 at the 3DHeals 2017 conference.
Advice about entrepreneurship in 3D printing was dispensed throughout the day from people who had mostly succeeded in their own goals of establishing firms that offer 3D printing services and products that are now in demand. The products include everything from customized breathing masks for sleep apnea patients to replacement limbs for amputees to engineered biological tissues for drug testing.
Dr. Yan Chow, who served as national chief innovation medical officer with Kaiser Permanente for eight years before joining the pharmaceutical firm Amgen, spoke about 3D start-ups from the viewpoint of an equipment buyer interviewing a new technology developer looking for customers. Based on his experience, Chow said he had identified some common patterns and problems with the developers’ approaches.
Getting the question right
“What problem are you trying to solve?” is a key question for entrepreneurs, Chow said. “In the 2,000 start-ups we saw, a lot of them didn’t know what problem they were trying to solve.”

Showing your prowess
The team behind the start-up is important, and it needs to show its healthcare prowess. Are there critical gaps in the team makeup? Maybe the start-up boasts a great team that includes a medical school professor and an engineer from a top-flight university such as Stanford — but its potential customer comes from the University of California, Berkeley.
You can’t know your customer too well, Chow said. And human skills are extremely important for success.
“When you go to meet somebody, a lot of it is decided in 10 minutes,” he said. “Do they like you and trust you?”
The start-up won’t have or be able to afford all the expertise it needs. But does it have resources in place to scale up quickly, if needed?
Evidence matters
Technology buyers also ask whether there is evidence to back up claims. Maybe your tiny firm hasn’t found a sponsor for a clinical study yet; however, the executive team must prepare for the question by doing its homework. That means at least talking to potential study sponsors and taking definitive steps toward getting evidence to support the product.
Evidence matters “because in healthcare the stakes are very high — life or death, in fact — and the regulatory barriers are formidable,” Chow said. “Many healthcare start-ups underestimate the barriers. New technology poses a couple of problems: one, that there’s no track record, and two, that there’s no agreement on what constitutes success and how it should be measured. These are not small issues.”
Is your product HIPAA compliant? Do you have 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to demonstrate your product’s safety and efficacy? With regard to electronic records and signatures, are you compliant with FDA Title 21, Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) Part 11? Are you protecting your patents at every stage of product development?
Along with the layers of formal regulation are the informal ones, such as community standards of practice and peer-reviewed literature, that cannot be overlooked, Chow said.
Finally, who’s going to pay for your technology? Has the company lined up insurers ready to reimburse for its use pending 510(k) clearance? Offering an example from the pharmaceutical industry, Chow said one manufacturer is offering a risk-sharing scheme, wherein patients and payors can get their money back if a drug doesn’t work.
What are other ways to reduce downside risk? Prepare the answers before the pitch, he said.
Find the star players
As for team building, panelist Leslie Karpas, founder and CEO of custom medical 3D design firm Metamason, said an important win for her firm was securing a principal at a leading healthcare firm to serve as medical director.
This individual “knows all of the major players in the space, all the major points of sale, and all the former executives from all the big companies that are in retirement mode that we’re now trying to hit up for funding,” he said.
Another key hire was a former director of clinical affairs from another large firm, who is writing Metamason’s clinical protocols.
“You can hang yourself with clinical protocols really quickly if you’re not careful,” Karpas said. “We ended up scrapping ours and rewriting them a number of times because once you are in a trial, whatever you test is what you get. So if you don’t frame the questions in a really neutral way, you can try to prove something that’s unprovable, even though there are a lot of other quality elements to what you’re doing, and then trap yourself. ”
How does a small start-up face the monumental tasks of sorting out regulations, building a team, and trying to obtain financing?
Get a doctor on your team who has a friendly relationship with an institutional review board (IRB) and is able to get approval to try prototypes in patients, Karpas said. Having a doctor who knows doctors who can help in arranging prototype testing can save a lot of time.
Your team should also have an experienced grant writer, which can be contracted out, and your doctor should be experienced in writing clinical trial proposals, preferably from an academic setting, Chow said. This is important because the protocols for the trial, once submitted, are set in stone.
“For us, we had to look at what we needed and what we could afford. We needed a lot, and we had almost nothing,” said Dr. Chris Hart, founder of Australia-based 3D firm Oventus.
Spending precious money on consultants with network contacts can be a smart move if they save you time and effort — and you can take their advice or ignore it, Hart said. Spending on intellectual property patents can also be a wise use of scarce resources. When you need far more than you have, you can also hand out stock options to get the people you need.
All of the panelists agreed that very small firms can save a lot of grief by partnering with a big player.

Collage: 3DHEALS2017

The post 3DHeals: 3D printing start-ups demand skill, persistence appeared first on 3DHeals.

By Tracy Leigh Hazzard and Tom Hazzard

This article/interview was originally published on 3dstartpoint.com.

3DHEALS2017: UCSF 3D Printing Library

The single most important challenge that people need to realize is that there is a lack of conversation between different disciplines.

We have a few challenges about the images that we have. One is, these images are not obtained based on any standard.

3D printing could be doing so much more for healing real people if there is a greater connection, if they close that communication gap between 3D printing and the medical community.

3DHEALS2017: RECAP

The post Medical 3D Printing with Jenny Chen of 3DHeals appeared first on 3DHeals.

By Norbert Sparrow, Editor in Chief at PlasticsToday, UBM Canon

This article was originally published in Plasticstoday.com on April 12, 2017.

3DHEALS2017 UCSF, April 20th, 2017

If you’re interested in the intersection of 3D printing and medical technology and happen to be near San Francisco, CA, next week, you might want to carve out some time to attend the 3DHEALS 2017 Global Conference: 3D Print Life. 3D HEALS is dedicated to the proposition that great things can happen if you bring together technologists from the start-up culture of Silicon Valley and the Bay Area and healthcare stakeholders under one roof. The organization has been around for a couple of years and has produced five successful events during that time. By reaching out to various stakeholders in the healthcare system, technology, regulatory affairs and more, “it made us realize that it takes a village to make revolution happen, and many challenges can only be overcome by a well-organized ecosystem,” write event organizers on the website. “We are hoping that by organizing this global event, 3DHEALS will contribute to fostering this burgeoning yet still fragile ecosystem.” Event organizers expect more than 400 attendees and approximately 40 speakers addressing all aspects of 3D printing in the medical space. It is scheduled for April 19 and 20 at the Mission Bay Conference Center at the University of California San Francisco. For more information, go to 3dheals.com.

Bedside printing: Who’s liable when things go horribly wrong? One aspect of the medical 3D-printing ecosystem that will become a hot topic when healthcare establishments start printing medical devices in house is the question of liability. The Legal Intelligencer published an enlightening article about this recently, “ The liability of hospitals and doctors printing 3D medical devices .” Traditionally, a manufacturer producing a 3D-printed device is subject to product liability claims. “But, when a hospital or doctor prints the device at their own facility, who is responsible if that device causes a patient harm?” writes Marion Munley, who offers well-informed insights into this looming legal conundrum. I use the word “looming” advisedly. While “bedside printers” are not yet a reality, the notion of printing personalized medical devices that conform to individual patient anatomies or other patient-specific medical needs is beyond tantalizing. The technology, for the most part, is available; what is standing in the way are the regulatory hurdles and, as Munley cogently notes, the legal thickets. For now, hospitals and doctors probably can’t be held strictly liable as suppliers of medical products, writes Munley. “They are considered to be akin to a consumer or user of a product when the product’s use is incidental to the provision of medical services, and are shielded from being held strictly liable.” The line between manufacturer and service provider will blur, however, “as hospitals and doctors begin to print 3D devices in bulk quantities and sell them to their patients,” Munley adds. Under current law, practitioners and medical establishments could be liable for negligence if a patient is injured by a defective in-house 3D-printed device, notes Munley, but that is difficult to prove. Depending on the circumstances, patients could also file a malpractice claim. There is a bit of a vacuum in this area of the law, which is concerning to Munley, “since it is widely anticipated that hospitals and doctors will significantly increase their production of 3D medical devices on-site, [and] patients injured by these 3D devices will face legal hurdles.” In the meantime, Munley concludes, the “FDA will have to continue to ensure that these products are safe, as well as properly regulated, until the law catches up with this rapidly evolving technology.”

Mark your calendar for 3DHEALS2018, April 20–21st, 2018

The post Medtech 3D printing: From a San Francisco happening to a legal limbo appeared first on 3DHeals.

By Eric Barnes, AuntMinnie.com staff writer

This article was originally published on March 22nd, 2017 on AuntMinnie.com.

”

3DHEALS2017 Recap, April 20th, 2017

3D printing is revolutionizing medicine — and radiology with it. But what’s the best way to learn about this emerging discipline? The 3DHeals International Conference, being held in San Francisco on April 20, will explore 3D printing in healthcare with an eye on virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence.
The meeting at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Mission Bay campus will feature hands-on workshops on 3D printing and talks on everything from 3D-printed organs to prosthetics to building surgical and educational models, according to organizers.

Neuroradiologist Dr. Jenny Chen.

Featuring experts from across the U.S., the meeting is aimed at anyone interested in 3D printing, but it will be especially relevant for radiologists, radiologic technologists, and surgeons who deal with the problems 3D printing addresses every day, according to 3DHeals founder and CEO Dr. Jenny Chen, a neuroradiologist and adjunct clinical instructor of radiology at Stanford University.
Radiology as prime beneficiary
3D printing is a natural adaptation for radiologists, according to Chen.
“On a daily basis, radiologists scan patients from the physical world into the digital world, review the digital data, and then give some kind of cognitive information to take care of them in the physical world,” she told AuntMinnie.com. “Now with 3D printing we can finally convert the physical data into a 3D object that surgeons can hold in their hand.”
For applications such as pediatric congenital heart disease, surgeons can plan their interventions holding the heart in their hand — something with enormous implications for patient care that wasn’t possible before 3D printing, she said.
“All of that cognitive information is now embedded in that physical object … and there is increasing evidence that having that data available for planning is reducing operating time,” improving outcomes, saving money, and wielding enormous effects on patients’ lives, she said.
3D printing a surgical guide is another application with enormous potential for radiology to cut costs and improve outcomes, Chen said. Exactly what and how the new technologies will reshape healthcare is the subject of many clinical trials, both currently underway and to come.
https://vimeo.com/168270199
Experience in a hurry
One key dynamic in medicine today is that older, more experienced surgeons benefit from a wealth of insight and experience they can use to, for example, “freehand the perfect incision and do the perfect surgical procedure,” Chen said. But with 3D-printed surgical guides, younger doctors with less experience who are still perfecting their art or have lower baseline skill levels can now perform better, helping to satisfy market demand.
“We’re an aging population,” she said. Without 3D printing, “we can’t meet the demand.”
And of course, it’s not just radiology that benefits from 3D printing. Specialties from orthopedics to cardiology are using computers and medical imaging to advance their fields.
“One of the benefits of this conference is that we combined all of the specialties in healthcare together to have a cross-pollination effect,” she said.
For example, radiology has lessons to learn from dentistry, which has a wealth of experience in 3D models and will have its own track at the conference.
In all, there will be 50 speakers at 3DHeals, including the following:

• Dr. Sanjay Prabhu, co-director of the SimPeds 3D printing service at Boston Children’s Hospital, will lead a medical hands-on workshop. Prabhu has a wealth of experience in 3D simulation, and his facility has a wide range of 3D printers for metal, plastic, and robotic and laboratory applications, Chen said.
• Justin Ryan, PhD, from Phoenix Children’s Hospital is part of a nationwide study of congenital pediatric heart disease.
• Dr. Lisa Lattanza, professor and chief of the division of hand, elbow, and upper extremity surgery at UCSF, is one of three prominent orthopedic surgeons speaking at the meeting. Using 3D printing, Lattanza performed successful elbow surgery on a patient who lacked usable arms on both sides and now has the use of one arm thanks to the life-transforming surgery, Chen said.
• Keith Murphy, chairman and CEO of Organovo, is among the pioneers of bioprinting 3D organs and one of several bioprinting leaders attending the event. “Research is ongoing” in bioprinting and “the regulatory burden is extremely high,” Chen said. “But all the science fiction will be coming true. We are innovating at an exponential rate.”

The multidisciplinary nature of the conference is aimed at eliminating the silos to which technology researchers are often confined, according to Chen. The best innovation doesn’t confine itself to a specific field, but rather approaches research from a problem-solving focus, endeavoring across disciplines to solve one critical small problem at a time.
“There’s no way the tech people can solve it without practicing medicine themselves, and on the other hand, clinicians aren’t well-educated on what’s happening in the tech world,” she said.
Innovating across specialties and combining clinical issues with technologies such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence (AI) is what drives progress, Chen said. AI in particular will be key to making 3D printing and stereolithography (STL) files easier to produce.
For radiologists looking to keep their skills relevant in a highly automated future, 3D printing is a great place to start, Chen added.
“Everyone is responsible for their own future,” she said.
Registration fees for the meeting have been intentionally minimized for medical students ($50) and residents ($150), and they are reasonable for physicians ($450) as well, Chen said. For more information or to register, click here.

The post 3DHeals conference explores 3D printing and more appeared first on 3DHeals.

Want to write a piece for 3DHEALS Expert Corner? Email us: info@3dheals.com

Background:
3D printing (also known as additive manufacture) is technically “invented” in the 1980s[1]. It represents a new method of digital manufacture by adding thin layers of material one on top of another based on a digital blueprint. The concept of creating physical objects based on digital data in a layer-by-layer fashion was quickly extended to bio-printing, where the raw material is bio-ink or stem cells. In a way, 3D printing represents an evolved form of human-computer interaction.

Main Technical Advantages:

For the healthcare sector, the main technical advantages of 3D printing include the following:

1. Mass customization: Perfect examples include the Invisalign and hearing aids. Although each individual brace or hearing aid is unique to the patient, the production process is highly automated and in much larger scale than their traditional counterparts.

2. Digital design and fabrication for the human body: Earlier 3D printing product for the human body focuses on exoskeleton, prosthesis, and wearable, in light of much lower regulatory barriers and concern for safety with such a new manufacture process. However, as the industry grows with new materials and printing technologies, more devices are being invented and approved for other more “internal” treatments. 3D printed metal implants are a great example of that. The most ambitious of all is bio-printing, where personalized replacement tissue can be “manufactured” on demand. Many believe bioprinting will play a major role in human organogenesis, or manufacture of human organs. The recent HBO series “West World” adopted this concept to an extreme, but not too far from what could be possible in a decade or so.

3. Remote care via internet: Because of the availability of the internet, providing tangible healthcare to rural areas, third world countries, or even in the battle field is now a possibility, because the digital blue print can be transferred anyway via the information highway at a very low cost. This eventually will also be critical for space travel.

4. Accelerate medical education: Practices make perfect. As long as humanity still depends on human physicians for surgeries, the need of haptic-experience-based training will always be there. However, given a growing aging population, current pace of medical training will not meet the demand for healthcare providers in the near future. Having physical simulation products like 3D printed models will allow the training process to shorten in duration for individual trainees and therefore decrease the supply-demand mismatch in healthcare labor force. Even after school, surgeons facing rare, complex, high-stake procedures can benefit from having these simulation models according to more and more evidences.[2]

5. Collaboration with other emerging technologies (Artificial intelligence, augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), robotics, and etc.): At the end of the day, 3D printing is just another extension of computer science, very much like other emerging technologies like VR/AR and AI. It is a new iteration of of an older tool, computers. It is a foreseeable future that many of these emerging technologies or tools will work together in many different healthcare applications. For example, several companies are already working on how AI can improve the visualization and segmentation process in 3D printing CAD software.

From an outcome perspective, these advantages translate into the following: 1) Cutting cost and time of existing practice 2) Invention of new procedures, concept, and products previously inconceivable, and finally 3) New perspectives on digital health.

Past Trend:

However, it is only recently the public, especially mainstream healthcare sector, starts to welcome this technology with excitements. There are a few speculations on why things are different now than then. First, regulatory barrier appears less opaque. The FDA website now has a significant amount of information and links on 3D printing.[3] About 85 3D printing based medical devices are FDA cleared in 2016.[4] Second, several major 3D printing patents are expiring or have already expired. This translates into potential more rapid innovations and growth. Finally, investment into the field is trending upwards. In 2012 President Obama’s showed visible support of the additive manufacture industry through the creation of the National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Institute (NAMII), and the U.S. government investing in 3D printing is the biggest in the world. Several companies made a number of large internal and external investments in recent years, showing confidence in the growth of the field.[5]

Future opportunities:

Terry Wohlers, the leading 3DP industry analyst, estimated in the 2015 Wohlers Report that the additive manufacturing (AM) industry, consisting of all AM products and services worldwide, grew 25.9% YOY to $5.165 billion in 2015. The report also estimated 13% of the market[6] to be in medical, which puts the size of the healthcare 3D market at about $671M. As impressive as the numbers, however, if 3D printing industry continues to only grow at a pace of about 20% per year, it will still be an insignificant fraction of the multi-trillion dollar manufacture industry in decades to come. True adoption of a new technology like 3D printing requires accelerated innovative application of the technology, in addition to continued development of the new tool itself. That is, having the best machines, software, and materials would mean little if there is no meaningful application to employ these. Thus, the most important element in adopting a new technology is people.

A quick survey of healthcare 3D printing companies shows just that.

In 1997, Zia Chishti and Kelsey Wirth founded Align Technology Inc, arguably one of the most successful 3D printing company in history. The inception of the company came from Zia’s own personal experience as a patient with dental braces. A business man himself, Zia connected the dots between digital workflow and additive manufacture, and Invisalign was born.

Dr. Chris Hart with his invention — 3D printed intra-oral sleep apnea device

In 2012, an Australian dentist Dr. Chris Hart founded Oventus Ltd., a company focusing on 3D printed mouthpiece to treat sleep apnea, a prevalent condition that often requires cumbersome mask or surgery. Dr. Hart himself also suffers from sleep apnea and basically treated himself with his own invention, which now evolves into an IPO device company ready for the US market.

Founder of Standard Cyborg: Jeff Huber

In 2014, a young engineer founded a software company called Standard Cyborg, focusing on streamlining the digital workflow in the process of making prosthetics. His passion for his company came from his own physical condition: he was born without a fibula in his right leg. Growing up, he had spent countless hours in office visits to have the perfectly fitting prosthetic legs.

Mr. Victor Portes from Silou Elle

In 2016, a fashion designer Victor Portes founded the company Silou Elle. Victor is a very unfortunate gentleman with several female family members afflicted with breast cancer. Given his witness of the painful experiences of the cancer survivors, Victor vows to produce a much better alternative 3D printed breast prosthesis for women treated for breast cancer.

All these founders are all extremely emotionally invested in their products. Their personal experiences with their (or their loved ones’) disease make them more empathetic towards the consumer and more passionate about their products. These traits allow them to sharply focus on problems truly worth solving. Finally, these individuals were also very fortunate to have the knowledge and accessibility to 3D printing and related tools. Without 3D printing, however, their problems will be solved at a much slower pace or impossible to be solved.

Therefore, the most powerful feature of 3D printing is that it empowers patients and healthcare providers to be innovators themselves, by giving them a new tool (like the computers) to be creative in solving problems that are worth solving and problems that are better solved by 3D printing.

And that is when 3D printing will help healthcare with making a quantum leap.

[1] History of 3D printing https://3dprintingindustry.com/3d-printing-basics-free-beginners-guide/history/

[2] Lessons Learned From Using 3D Printed Models to Improve Surgical Planning http://blog.stratasys.com/2016/11/18/surgical-planning-3d-printed-models/

[3] 3D Printing of Medical Devices http://www.fda.gov/MedicalDevices/ProductsandMedicalProcedures/3DPrintingofMedicalDevices/

[4] FDA Issues Long-Awaited 3D Printing Guidance for Medical Devices — See more at: http://www.raps.org/Regulatory-Focus/News/2016/05/09/24901/FDA-Issues-Long-Awaited-3D-Printing-Guidance-for-Medical-Devices/#sthash.hr99W597.dpuf

[5] Ten Healthcare 3D Printing Events that Defined the Field in 2016 https://3dheals.com/ten-healthcare-3d-printing-events-that-defined-the-field-in-2016/

[6] 13% is a result of a survey of 40 systems manufacturers and 87 service providers globally, based on their revenue, Wohlers Report 2015

The post 3D Printing (and Bioprinting) will help healthcare with a quantum leap? appeared first on 3DHeals.

While most coverage and media discussion of 3D printed prosthetics focuses on the devices themselves, in reality, the prosthesis is actually just a part of a more complex and nuanced process of prosthetic rehabilitative care, which starts well before an individual receives a prosthesis and continues long after they have been fitted.

Andreas Bastian is a researcher, designer, and engineer with deep experience in developing and applying cutting edge 3D printing technologies. A principal research scientist at Autodesk, he has explored novel configurations of stereoloithography technologies, scalable parallelization of toolpath based technologies, and industrial applications of additive manufacturing capabilities. Previously, he has developed novel FDM hardware and low-cost metal printing experiments as an artist in residence at Autodesk and developed an open source laser sintering system as part of the openSLS research he conducted as a fellow at the Advanced Manufacturing Research Institute at Rice University and Dr. Jordan Miller’s Physiologic Systems Engineering and Advanced Materials Laboratory. As the lead R&D engineer at MakerBot Industries, he conducted research into core mechanisms of the FDM process.

As a director and chair of the research and technology board at ECF, a non-profit devoted to developing low-cost systems for prosthetic care, Andreas leads design and development of high performance 3D printable prosthetics and of LimbForge, a scalable software platform for their deployment. Central to his work is the belief that 3D printing technology can only affect change when it is realizing thoughtful, human-centered design.

Previously he has worked with the e-NABLE community where he developed novel thermoforming techniques, guided community design efforts, and designed popular assistive devices. Andreas will be a speaker at 3DHEALS2017.

Q: What is your vision on the intersection of 3D Printing and healthcare?

A: 3D printing provides an incredible opportunity to better address the needs of patients that have not been met by conventional manufacturing techniques. I hope for a world in which products are not designed for the average person, but a world in which design systems exist to allow the rapid creation of highly contextual, appropriate products that address previously unmet needs.

Q: What do you specialize in? What is your passion?

A: I specialize in making scalable systems for the design and delivery of custom 3D printed prosthetic devices. While most coverage and media discussion of 3D printed prosthetics focuses on the devices themselves, in reality, the prosthesis is actually just a part of a more complex and nuanced process of prosthetic rehabilitative care, which starts well before an individual receives a prosthesis and continues long after they have been fitted.

Photo Credit: Andreas Bastian/ ECF

Q: What inspired you to do what you do?

A: I began exploring the idea of 3D printed prosthetics as one of the e-NABLE community’s earliest members. Within that community, I participated in the design and release of some of e-NABLE’s most popular devices, but gradually learned that the crowdsourced design and manufacture of assistive devices was not scalable. And without a thoughtful, patient-centered design process, it would not produce designs that met real needs. When we take a step back, prosthetic devices are remarkable things when viewed through the lens of product design. They are fundamentally human-centered objects. The design intent behind a prosthesis is not necessarily to replace a lost limb, but to address the individual’s greatest perceived loss. This is remarkably personal and unique to that specific individual. So from a design perspective, there is a promising fit between the product design requirements of a prosthesis and the capabilities presented by 3D printers.

What motivates me is that 3D printing is really about design. 3D printers are ultimately only as valuable as the things that they make and the things that they make are only as valuable as the design that defined them. And when it comes to scaling prosthetic care, the challenge is not one of designing a single device, but one of designing a system for appropriate, impactful design, and this is what my team is building with LimbForge.

Q: What is the biggest potential impact you see 3D printing having on the healthcare industry?

A: I see three very important impact mechanisms playing out over the coming years:

1. Custom Geometry
   3D printing is often a great fit for body-interfacing parts, such as orthoses, braces, surgical guides, and medical implants. Many applications in the medical space will find 3D printing to be a better pathway to customized devices than conventional processes.
2. Complex Geometry
   Structural complexity can be highly functional and valuable in certain applications, such as oseointegratition implants, in which the fine stuctures made possible with advanced design and metal 3D printing capabilities facilitate bone growth into the porous surface of an implant.
3. Supply Chain Disruption
   “Digital supply chains” will become increasingly important for clinics in under resourced and remote areas where traditional shipping and distribution methods fall short.

Photo Credit: Andreas Bastian/ ECF

Q: What challenges do you see arising in implementing 3D printing in healthcare sector in the next 5 years?

A: The biggest challenge I see is that 3D printing is not yet a mature manufacturing technology. We cannot yet rely on a 3D printer to produce the same part twice, let alone at production volumes. And as 3D printing sees more adoption as a distributed manufacturing technology, we will need to see significant advances in in-machine process monitoring and validation to address the challenge of distributed QA, especially for applications in the medical space.

Beyond this there are numerous challenges in materials development, software, and certification, but those are all secondary to the challenge of making 3D printing into a technology that we can truly call additive manufacturing.

Q: What is the best business lesson you have learned?

A: Ultimately, there is only one reason people adopt 3D printing: it has to save them money. Granted, there are many situations in which it makes sense to adopt 3D printing for the marketing and PR value that surfing the hype wave brings, but this is not sustainable. I have had conversations with the heads of additive manufacturing at major automotive companies and spoken at length with clinic administrators in Port-au-Prince about 3D printing technology and how it can be useful to each party and it all comes down to one thing: does it save time, money, or both.

Q: Tell us about what your organization does.

A: ECF makes a piece of software for clinicians called LimbForge. LimbForge is a platform for the customization and manufacture of 3D printed prosthetics. It allows clinicians to quickly and easily configure and print highly customized upper limb prosthetic devices. ECF’s upper limb prosthetics are designed to address the highly contextual needs of a given patient population and are informed by the needs of specific patients as well as an understanding of cultural and societal norms that surround a patient. The goal is to develop devices that are sensitive to the cultural context of the patient and that provide the social functionality demanded by patients as well as physical functionality.

Using LimbForge and 3D printing and scanning technology can save clinicians time normally spent shaping prosthetic devices by hand and can allow them to see more patients in a given day. Additionally, by designing standardized printed interfaces and components, LimbForge enables a “digital supply chain”, which is extremely valuable in areas where it can take weeks, months, or even years to source.

The post Interview: Mr. Andreas Bastian appeared first on 3DHeals.