AMMM Focus Sessions

This session presents the results of a collaborative project to create a complete digital and physical value chain for patient-specific orbita implants using AI algorithms and additive manufacturing. The team developed a segmentation process chain, trained an implant design algorithm, optimized the additive manufacturing process, and validated the implants' density, microstructure, and biocompatibility. A relational database structure was developed for process traceability, and the workflow was validated for necessary certification requirements.

Models of anatomical structures and details have already played an important role in medicine for a long time, especially in the education of physicians, but also in the development of procedures and devices. With the sophisticated tools of advanced 3D-printing, the reproduction of very special individual features becomes more versatile, while the process is accelerated at the same time. This opened up new applications like presurgical planning, or the training of surgery and interventions on rare pathologies under realistic conditions. 

Personalised medicine allows for optimal patient care and is also sustainable in terms of healthcare costs. Recent efforts are moving in the direction of OR-side printing of implants and are opening up the view of the last big goal: the production of individually customised implants in the surgical wound itself. Here, undercuts can be created, graded soft-hard as well as biologised-inorganic transitions can be produced. The challenges, however, are great and range from radiation and heat management in the body cavity, to the control of polymerisation radicals, to a regulatory approach yet to be developed as an overarching clinical process.