Researchers discover way to 3D print directly inside the body without surgery | Hacker News Reader

Researchers discover way to 3D print directly inside the body without surgery

hothardware.com

194 pointsddtaylor62 comments

Wait, 3D printing by sonochemistry? That is incredible. Sonochemistry is like a weird glitch in the universe's physics engine, "look at what this tiny bubble can do".

The actual paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-29395-1

I have a 3d printer at home... that's gonna be a huge pill to swallow!

Well, then good news! It's a suppository!

That's gonna be a huge pain in the ass to get it inside

Maybe it could assemble itself inside you. "It's 3D-printers all the way down..."

Soon in youtube: "DIY stomach reduction at your own home for dummies, ask Phil".

In fact starting with stomach reduction sounds like a low hanging fruit with a bigger target, wide safety interval, less nerves sunbathing in the middle of the road and much less prone to legal troubles (as long as the material would support strong acids without leaking anything nasty).

Maybe in the future we could print something low-caloric content that would disintegrate slowly in some weeks to help obese people with their diets.

Hey honey, about those breast implants...

That is actually amazing idea :) just think about it, and it would be no cuts and you can shape implant to desired shape, it is not just a sack but it can have some structure.

Take my angry upvote. :)

Just chug a pint of resin to chase it down.

My God, based on what I know, drinking UV sensitive resin would have to be one of the worst ways to die.

-emia meaning presence in the blood.

He drank a pint of UV-sensitive resin, this is how he exploded.

I had to go to the dentist’s yesterday and while looking at some pics I thought the idea of literally screwing in an implant tooth in your gum to be pretty damn crude, primitive even. It would be cool if we could inject some artificial 3D printing thingies in the gum that feed on nutrients from your body and slowly create a new tooth as programmed beforehand.

Such robotic thingies could also be used to build new bones or slowly change the structure of existing bones. That would be pretty damn amazing.

That roughly follows some proposed applications of stem cell therapy. Why invent a nanomachine swarm when we are all nanomachine swarms?

Some people really dislike when Grog try to play God, either for misguided religious reasons or somewhat reasonable comprehension of the sheer scale of human ignorance in regards to biological systems.

Icarus is just one of the oldest tellings of the Law of Unintended Consequences. Can we/should we doesn’t require technology to become a problem, but it sure makes for a stunning light show.

A lot of civics comes down to can we/should we as well, and that doesn’t take any technology at all. It’s just a social dystopia instead of a technological one.

What religion has a problem with regenerating teeth? It's just a hard problem. We don't even need placenta for stem cells anymore, and we still are a while away from creating a second set of teeth

I recently got the implant pitch from my dentist, and we’re already dipping our toes into that. When you extract a molar, they fill the hole with “bone chips” that the bone cells expand into. This not only speeds up the healing process, it augments it. You get a stronger (less weak, really) jaw with it than just letting nature take its course. That material can be sterilized cow, or human bone, but they are also moving to a synthetic material. I’m not sure if that’s 3D printed or fired like aerogel. Seems like it could be either.

Right now it sounds they use small pieces and just pack them into the channels like pebbles, I suspect we could tailor the grafts to the hole, improving the outcomes incrementally. For instance, printing a convex wrap on the post of the implant that can slide into the hole and fill most of it (we know bones only need proximity not contact in order to repair. This is a nasty trick they use to make people with dwarfism taller, by breaking the leg bones and then not letting them fuse, causing the gap to fill up with new bone).

I think something similar every time I look at the massive scar on my ankle where I had a steel plate installed after an injury. This is going to seem tremendously primitive sometime soon.

I have a scar from my breastbone around curving up my back, tracing the route of a rib. When I was 12 I had heart surgery, and that's how they did it back then.

My new doctor was amazed - said I'm a walking museum. That technique lasted just a couple of years before they turned to poking holes and putting cameras and instruments through the holes.

I guess most of medicine seems pretty primitive to what we had even a few years back!

My father had a relatively similar tibia injury in the 70s that predated the plate installations and his tibia is not quite straight and took about 6 months to heal in a hip-height cast. I ran a 7 minute mile 3 months to the day after my injury.

>It would be cool if we could inject some artificial 3D printing thingies in the gum that feed on nutrients from your body and slowly create a new tooth as programmed beforehand.

Hmm, that sounds just like a cell. In fact it would probably be easiest to find a way to turn tooth regeneration on. Other animals have it, there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to except that we haven't figured out how yet.

I agree though and I've thought that before-- something about the dentists office is especially crude. But then again what do you expect when we have chunks of mineral in our face we use to mash food with? Teeth themselves are rather crude

This is really a trap I'd like to point out. We often, or usually, look at natural systems without seeing the full picture. This hubris of thinking we understand it when we don't understand many aspects of it is dangerous.

Teeth are not crude, that's just a reductionist understanding of them, or lacking understanding of the many integrated systems they are dynamically part of.

i.e. they have to do the right thing, at the right time, with many other aspects of the body. They grow, resize, even regrow, adapt to spaces and situations, handle living in organic environment with a garden of living bacteria etc, dynamically store and make available minerals and maybe other building blocks for the rest of the body, have a lifecycle, have many organic components, and likely more features I am not aware of!

The main article image implies they are going to 3D print an ear and nose inside my body. If that's what these scientists are up to, they should be ashamed of themselves. I don't want to hear or smell anything in there.

Be grateful that they don't print tongues or taste buds in your ass lol

You'll be disappointed to learn that we, in fact, do have taste buds everywhere inside our bodies, including the gut, lungs and bladder. Not clear whether there are any in the ass per se, but having experienced no.2 after eating very spicy food, I wouldn't be surprised.

https://journals.lww.com/co-clinicalnutrition/Fulltext/2014/...

Hot tech. As a comment on the blog points out, this thing briefly hits 15000k under your skin, 3x hotter than the sun!

The cyberpunk back-alley clinic where you'd have something like this done will give you a piece of leather to bite on at no additional cost.

Don't forget that it's health care in the US, so it'll be the same piece of leather everyone else has used, but wiped down with a Clorox wipe.

Like that hamburger seller from Demolition Man: "Do you see any cows down here?"

I loved Stallone's reaction to that.

$3000 to rent the leather. $649 for the wipe.

don't forget the office visit fees for the 35.32 seconds the doctor was actually present in the room.

Oops, the doctor was out of network. That'll be $3532.99!

While you lay in a tub of ice.

I want to see this show...

So, if there is a glitch and it stays on too long, do you just vaporize?

Clever, they'd need to get it right first time though. If it throws a flub you'd need surgery to get it out.

This is clearly a long looong way from actual use

"Ah my apologies it seems like we have a bit of a layer shift, I'll schedule you for intensive care right away..."

> By utilizing sound instead, energy is able to be directed to the correct spot, forming a small bubble through a process called cavitation. Temperatures can reach a pressure approximately 1,000 times that of air at sea level and around 27,000 degress Fahrenheit, which is hotter than the 10,000 degrees surface of the sun.

I wonder if the more medically relevant use of this technology isn’t 3D printing but rather treating tumors?

Ultrasound is already used to treat kidney stone disease [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidney_stone_disease#Lithotrip...

The vast majority of patients using that get some kind of kidney injury... some even kidney damage.

Ow... doesn't sound that great.

those cavitation bubbles should be able to destroy cancer cells too. I.e. probably can be used instead of radiation and proton "knives".

Yes, there's been lots of research for many years on this.

https://www.google.com/search?channel=fs&client=ubuntu&q=ult...

And if you want a real tangible example of cavitation, albeit via microwaves rather than focussed ultrasound, take a look at any plastic food containers that you microwave regularly. You'll likely be able to see food that has been 'jetted' into the plastic.

If it's just heat and destruction you need, we have gold nano particles that can absorb infared radiation and locally cook tumors.

I am confused. Isnt 3d printing about additive manufacturing? how do they get the material inside your body before blasting rebecca black's friday at your organ?

So the material that is solidified by the "Flesh Penetrating Sound Waves" would be what - Body tissue? Injected resin? The excess resin would have to be harmlessly biodegradable.

"Flesh Penetrating Sound Waves" sounds like a band in a David Cronenberg film.

That's nice, but I'm seeing a distinct lack of substantive commentary on this post. What's up with that?

Why don't these scientists ever think about these obvious questions? If only everything could be run by programmers.

That's an entirely misleading statement, and unnecessarily flippant delivery too.

I would say that the _article_ , which surely was not written by "these scientists", is very light on the important and interesting details. Possibly not aimed at a "programmers" audience.

It literally says what materials they've used it with successfully and mentions what materials they're still aiming to be able to use.

The single sentence about "polymer-metal composites" and "metal" raises more questions than it answers. To me, anyway.

I'm sure that "these scientists" are on the case, but the article not so much.

Wow. Hate to imagine the FDA approval process for this.

Agreed, it would not be fun at all. You would have to prepare a de novo submission [1].

[1] https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/premarket-submissions-se...

Can't wait for the kickstarter campaigns.

So Cronenberg's latest movie "Crimes of the Future" is not SciFi anymore. This was fast.

What could go wrong?

Does this work with Adamantium? Asking for a friend.

Nice try Wolverine. Everyone knows you don't have friends.

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