People With Head Traumas Can Have Up To 75 Percent Of Their Skull Replaced By A 3-D-Printed Implant
3-D printing has been evolving rapidly over these years, and 3-D-print customized prosthetics is no surprise anymore. The latest news in this filed is that a man in the northeastern U.S. had 75 percent of his skull replaced by a 3-D printed implant made by a Connecticut-based biomedical company, Oxford Performance Materials. This innovative methot could be used to replace cancerous bone in the skull, car accident victims and people with head trauma. The implant, called the OsteoFab Patient Specific Cranial Device, was authorized by the FDA for use in the U.S. in mid-February. It took only five days to make a replacement bone of PEKK, a biomedical implant polymer that’s mechanically similar to bone and is osteoconductive, meaning bone cells will grow and attach to small details on its surface. Important is, that the implant doesn’t interfere with X-ray equipment: it shows up as a shadow on the image, being transparent. Oxford Performance Materials is now planning to 3-D print bone implants for other parts of the body in the nearest future.
Via:popsci.com
