Baby's life saved with 3-D printed device that restored his breathing

"Daddy, what was it like when someone else had to make the stuff you used?"

SOURCE: My company has been using $1-500K 3D printers for the past 15 years.

I can't imagine the people I went to medical school with considering or even knowing about such a thing, if it hasn't already been well-established. Also, there is an amazing amount of modeling that went into this particular piece. It's not just a matter of printing out a structure, it also has to fit the patient - and in this case it was a fairly complicated shape.

It may be worth being impressed by the printable medium, though. The stuff isn't you regular ABS off a Cupcake CNC. It's biocompatible and will slowly be re absorbed into the body. That itself is something I hadn't known existed before, and that material is likely the real innovation here.

Still, ads everywhere and a very busy content layout detracts from the usability of the site.

Clearly ( http://evernote.com/clearly/ ) does a really good job at scrubbing the page and changing the text to be more readable.

http://www.uofmhealth.org/news/archive/201305/baby%E2%80%99s...

Just imagine when _stuff_ is like that. Expect some nasty things, but also expect cheap, easily reproducible miracles. I'd take that trade.

What scares me are the people who are going to start foaming at the mouth to ban 3D printing because you could print a gun. I'm afraid our best-case scenario is "heavily regulated", so I fully support anything that democratizes the technology, even if it is just printing stupid chochskies.

Rocks: You can bash skulls or build cathedrals. Do both and we call it human.

They probably see that 3D printers are too widespread and too economically game-changing to be banned, effectively at any rate, and thus that by showing how printers enable production of something, they can show that regulating that thing at the historical source is going to be ineffective.

I imagine these people are your allies more than you think.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc1206319

Academia moves slowly. You want to make sure that your innovation actually had a net positive effect (does the patient actually survive?), you need clearances, you need to do the write-up, the journal needs publication space; honestly, I'm surprised that it's just a year. Novel techniques are attempted every day. You don't hear about them instantaneously because a majority of them don't work.

But for a small child developing, the goal is to brace it long enough for the child's body to grow out of it, and then it's reabsorbed. That way the body can use it as supportive scaffolding, but eventually heals away. Which isn't as snazzy as a cyborg kid, but pretty cool that after a few years the child is running on their own support!

The splint provides a structure for the airways to grow in/around/within, making sure they don't collapse in the meantime. Once the airways are properly developed the splint is no longer required.

From the article:

"The material we used is a nice choice for this. It takes about two to three years for the trachea to remodel and grow into a healthy state, and that's about how long this material will take to dissolve into the body," says Hollister.