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Session: Medical devices & safety
Session starts: Thursday 24 January, 10:30
Presentation starts: 11:00
Room: Lecture room 535

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Costanza Culmone (Delft University of Technology)
Paul WJ Henselmans ()
Gerwin Smit ()
Paul Breedveld ()

Abstract:
Additive manufacturing (AM), also known as 3D printing, is a technology to directly transform a computer-aided design (CAD) model into a 3D object. This technology is rapidly changing the production methods of medical devices. The additive manufacturing technology enables short-time and low-cost production avoiding the long process of conventional fabrication methods. Fields of applications vary from artificial tissues and organ transplant to the development of personalized orthoses and prostheses. Since the last decades, the interest in producing instruments for diagnostic and surgery is increasing. Using additive manufacturing technologies gives a considerable freedom in terms of complexity of the design. Hence, several research groups are trying to push the potential to the extreme. In the same time, due to the inexpensiveness of such technologies, the additive manufacturing is opening the door to an easier access to the healthcare in remote areas and in the developing countries as well as to a new class of customized disposable instruments for rare diseases and complex anatomies. In our group, we focus on design medical instruments with highly complex functionality for minimally invasive surgery to use in both the laparoscopic and endoscopic procedures. By using additive manufacturing, we are able to manufacture elaborate structures by reducing the number of components and increasing the complexity of the single element. Moreover, by using both vat photopolymerization (VP) and polyjet (PJ) technologies we can play with the thickness of the elements and create flexible structures. For these reasons, we are contributing to a new generation of steerable instruments which can be printed in one printing step in order to reduce the assembly time and the manufacturing cost, increasing functionality and performance.