For pediatric surgeons like Dr. Salil Upasani, surgery can take hours – and the preparation process can take just as long.
During a panel at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday, Upasani, who works at Rady Children’s Hospital showed how 3D printing has become a tool for speeding that process up.
Upasani described the use through a case of a patient’s “septic hip,” involving an infection that was slowly fracturing the young patient’s hip bone.
“I had to figure out how to cut the bone, change the shape of her femur to make it more ‘normal,’” Upasani said. More importantly, he said, he asked himself, “How can I hold it in place to help her heal?”
Upasani and Justin Ryan, director of Rady’s 3D Innovations Lab, were joined on the panel by innovators at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, where medical 3D printing is also used.
With a computed tomography (CT) scan and the help of the 3D Innovations Lab at Rady, Upasani and the team of engineers helped print a replica of the patient’s bone, helping him prepare his surgical steps more quickly with a visual model.
Following the procedure, the patient’s bone is healed.
“It helped me do the surgeries on the models and be able to do it more efficiently in children,” Upasani said on the benefits of 3D printed models, which have become more accepted in healthcare on top of becoming tools in manufacturing and agriculture.
Rady, the largest pediatrics hospital in California, created the 3D Innovations Lab in 2018 to help surgeons prepare to operate by printing models that replicate patients’ unique anatomies.
“We 3D print brains and femur and hips, hearts, skulls, basically any anatomy with an image,” Ryan said.
Ryan said Rady surgeons use these 3D-printed models to speed up the surgical preparation process, understanding each patient’s anatomy a little better based on diseases, deformities or disorders, since every human body’s build varies based on bone structures or vascular systems.
“That differentiation is further exploded when we have disease throughout the mix,” Ryan said.
Using the CT scans, Ryan and his team transfer the anatomical data points to a 3D plane, where exact measurements up to .4 mm, are created for anatomical models.
Printing, according to Ryan, can take from two hours up to 72 hours, depending on the complexity of the model.
Today, the lab has five innovators and eight different 3D printers that can mimic the form of strong bones and softer cartilage.
Not only do the models assist surgeons, they can be repurposed to train medical residents as well. Comic-Con is just the space to share these interesting tools, Ryan explained.
“Surgeons of tomorrow can effectively look at not just what disease looks like but what disease looks like over a patient population,” he said.
Ryan, who has a background in animation and art, compared being able to present his work at the convention to being published in Rolling Stone magazine.
“To see 3D modeling and 3D printing take hold within a hospital, especially as Rady has adopted it, has been incredible,” Ryan said.
