Jan Witowski, a medical student at the Jagiellonian University, has developed an innovative, probably the cheapest in the world printing method 3D liver models. Printed copies are already helping in surgery patients. Operations with the use of 3D printed models are rare liver. The obstacle is primarily just the high cost.
Student from Krakow hopes that through his method manages to popularize 3D prints of the liver, which serve the medicine and will assist during the operation.
Polish model - 500 zł - 120 EUR foreign - several thousand zł - a few thousand EUR
Prints 3D models of organs, to facilitate diagnosis and surgery of the patient, increasingly used in medicine. But prints are rare liver. - The liver is a complex organ anatomically and print it is also complicated. The cost of production of one model of a 400-500 zł, while the other, the foreign models - several thousand. zł - says Jan Witowski.
Low production costs organ scheme by the Polish project arise primarily from printing capabilities in the average 3D printer. Foreign models are designed so that their print specialist is needed, the way the machine.
Expensive printer use to print primarily resins (transparent, colored, flexible) - thanks to all models come with the printer. According to the draft Vitovskoho plastic model elements (corresponding to the inside of the liver) are printed separately and then "flood" the corresponding silicon (which takes the shape of the liver).
He found a material which replaces resin
Polish student was able to find a material that is transparent (the model of the liver must be transparent, would see the internal structure of the organ) and was replaced by a transparent resin in expensive printers. - Selected by silicone us great works, so we can get past a very expensive machine and use ordinary printers that can literally put on the desk - he explains.
- Our solution is not nothing worse than much more expensive, the proposed abroad - provides Witowski.
For now, the model is used at the University Hospital in Krakow, but interest in it is growing among Polish and foreign surgeons. The invention now writes a specialist foreign press.
The precise location of the affected tissue
Liver 3D model accurately reproduces the structure of the patient's organ, thereby allowing physicians during surgery more accurately than CT scans to find altered tissues, including tumors, the position of which is sometimes difficult to detect using standard imaging methods.
- With great enthusiasm we approach this type of models, because they let preoperatively explain some of the intricacies of anatomy that can surprise us during surgery. With such prints, we know that the structure of the organ, which facilitates the planning and conduct of operations - says dr. Michał Pędziwiatr, a surgeon at the University Hospital in Krakow.
As he explained, the primary indication for liver metastases of other cancers (especially colorectal cancer) to this organ. The doctor added that there are not many places in Poland, which deal with the operations of the liver and therefore "it seems that the number of patients requiring surgery is greater than the number of places where you can perform these operations."
And why I write about it, but because when I started with the first gain some information about 3D printing is a thinker, with some incredible things is that in Poland there for maybe 50 years. It was in January or February of this year. Today, we have the end of May and it turns out that a student from Krakow away from Lancut about 190 km any discovered a new way to print liver model using a 3D printer. This is getting to be quite real. But it does not end. It turns out to be after reading the first few sentences that the student is a person who went to high school in Lancut that is in my hometown. and that to me is just so amazing.
