Individualized treatment of orthopaedics and 3D printing technology / 医用生物力学

ABSTRACT

Individualized treatment is an important direction in the development of orthopaedics. Either the application of the custom-made implants or using patient-specific surgical instrument to assist the implantation of conventional prosthesis, theoretically, could improve the matching between the implants and adjacent bony structures, so as to improve the overall function of the patients. However, the superiority of individualized treatment in theory cannot compensate its complexity and time-lag caused by individualized therapy in preoperative planning, design, manufacturing, etc. Therefore, individualized treatment is just a concept in most of the time. With the development of image technology and the maturity of 3D printing technique, the efficiency of individualized design and manufacturing is expected to be improving significantly, which shows the potential to translate this elegant concept into a practical principle.