Successful surgery to replace the skull with an implant printed on a 3D printer

Representatives of Oxford Performance Materials, Connecticut, USA, reported a successful operation at the beginning of this week . An unnamed patient in an American clinic received a skull printed on a 3D printer after his skull model was created using a 3D scanner.





The printed skull is not a monolithic piece of plastic, small details are engraved on its surface to stimulate the growth of cells and tissues of the bone on the implant.



Oxford Performance Materials received permission from federal regulatory agencies on February 18, and the operation was almost immediately carried out, but its outcome was reported only now. Representatives of the company claim that the technology will provide implants for many patients with damaged skull bones after a disease or injury. This is about five hundred people per month in the United States alone, many are injured in construction or as a result of gunshot wounds.



Representatives of the company claim that it takes two weeks to manufacture the skull after scanning the damaged area.

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Upd: In the skull 23 bones, the patient was replaced with three-quarters of these bones. In fact, he was replaced by almost 20 bones! Can you imagine what is left of his “native” skull? Lower jaw? Orbits? Sphenoid bone? He probably had only those bones that could not be reached, because replacing them could threaten brain damage (for example, damage to the medulla oblongata will lead to an instantaneous failure of the entire peripheral nervous system, and as a result, death). I think that if 24 bones of a hand from 30 were printed on a printer, it would be normal to say that we had replaced the skeleton of the hand.