Will 3D printers, bioprinters change the future of surgery?

When an MRI revealed a golfball-sized tumour growing in Pamela Shavaun Scott's skull, the California psychotherapist turned to a 3D printer to help find the least invasive and risky way for doctors to extract it.

Her husband, Michael Balzer, the founder of a 3D printing service company, used her medical records to create a three-dimensional image of her brain on his computer and print a 3D model of it.

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"I could see literally, in pretty good detail, my wife and the inside of her head more importantly, the tumour itself," saysBalzer.

Doctors used his images and printout to help determine how best to surgically remove the tumour. They removed 95 per cent of it last May, deciding that the remainder was too close to the optic nerve of her left eye to risk cutting into.

At the hospital, several residents approached Balzer, excited about the potential of using 3D models as teaching aids. "There was a little bit of buzz," he admits.

At some hospitals, doctors regularly study3Dmodels to diagnose maladies or practice complicated surgeries.

But these futuristic printers can be more thana teaching aid, they've become a hotbed of medical solutions to complex patient problems.

In fact, scientists have been frantically printing customizedprostheses andimplants from head (skull implant) to toe (titanium heel implant).

The advent of bioprinters which use what is calledbioink made of replica human tissue have upped the 3D printing game. Now, the race is on to create the first bioprinted organ and transplant it inside a human body.

3D printed scalpels act like a 'cookie cutter'

DoctorFrank Rybickistarted using 3D models whileworking on patients with severe facial injuries, such asan Afghanistan war veteran who had a piece of bone from a leg reconstructed into a new jawat the Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Mass.

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"If you3D-printed the patient before the surgery, you could really understand what you needed to do because you would be able to hold the defect in your hands as opposed to just looking at a picture of it," he says.

Not only that, the printouthelps patients better understand what's wrong with them and how their doctor will attempt to remedy it. Plus, doctors can practice a surgery on the model before heading into the operating room.

Rybickidoesn't just print models. He's also printed scalpels shaped to make the exact cut needed to grab skin from a patient's buttocksor leg and transplant it onto a face.

"You get these amazing results, because all the tissues match up because you 3D-printed the cookie cutter."

Rybicki, who's the incomingchief of medical imaging at the Ottawa Hospital and chair of radiology at the University of Ottawa,is advocatingfor a national3Dprinting lab there because he believes the technology is "enormously helpful."

Tissues, tumours bioprinted for experiments

He finds one of the most exciting development is the almost"Star Wars"-like field ofbioprinting, like when San Diego-basedOrganovolast year unveiled a 3D bioprinted human liver tissue for scientific research.

Organovohopes the printed liver will lead tothedevelopment of better, safer drugs faster and less expensively than when only animal and human testing was possible, saysMichaelRenard, the company's executive vice-president of commercial operations.

At the moment, onlyliver tissue is available for testing, but the company expects to release other printed tissue, including kidney, skin, lung andblood vessel as well as bone, Renard says.

Organovo has also built tumours for scientists to experiment on, allowing for "interesting experiments" that couldn'tethically be conducted if the tumour was inside a person's body.

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Another team of scientists at the company is attempting to develop tissues that could be transplanted into a real patient.

Thisbioprinted kidney or liver likely wouldn't resemble the images people are used to seeing inanatomy books, Renard explains.

"Restoring, you know, kidney function to someone who's really failing doesn't require two perfectly architected human kidneys to do that," he says.

The bioprinted tissue would have to restore the original organ's lost functionality, he says. That could be achieved through "some form of patch," made of tissue that could be implanted to assist the failing area.

'No. 1' goal is bioprinted organ

In a lab inWinston-Salem, N.C., scientists have already grown a whole vaginal organ that was later transplanted into a patient who was born without one.

The Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine's scientists builtthat organ by hand. But they havebeen experimenting with bioprinters for more than a decade to speedup the creation process, says the lab'sdirector, Dr. AnthonyAtala.

Easily producible spare kidneys, lungs and hearts could speed up lengthy wait times for patients on organ donation lists.

At Wake Forest, scientists have been working on about 30 different types of tissues and organs, Atalasays, from the simplestflat structures, such as skin, to the most complex organs, such as "miniature livers and hearts."

So far, bioprinting organs to transplant into humans has been unsuccessful, and Atala says it's hard to predict when scientists will make thebreakthrough.

Solid organs are incredibly complex with many more cells per centimetre than skin, one of the simpler structures that has been created. For organs, doctors must be able to make blood vessels capable of keeping blood flowing to them.

Despite the challenges, Atala's commitment seems unshakeable. Printing organs, he says, "isthe number one thing that we're trying to get to."