3D printers and the additive manufacturing or rapid prototyping model are among the revolutionary technological developments we’ve begun to hear about more and more often… In fact, some even consider them the beginning of the Third Industrial Revolution…
This technology, which has begun to be used as an active production method in many different fields—from aerospace technology to the automotive industry, and from the construction sector to the food and apparel industries—has also started to make its presence felt in the medical field.
These machines—which can transform a part, whether imagined or perfectly tailored to a person’s own anatomy, into tangible objects “at low cost” within a short period of time after it has been modeled on a computer—are now capable of producing educational anatomical models, patient-specific surgical guides and instruments, patient-specific implants, and even patient-specific tissues and organs.
In our 26-year-old patient with a deformity in the right hip due to developmental hip dysplasia (formerly known as hip dislocation), we utilized this technology for the osteotomy (bone cutting and realignment) surgery we planned on the upper end of the femur (thigh bone). I wanted to share with you the journey of this patient, for whom we performed corrective surgery using a cutting guide that perfectly matched the patient’s own bone anatomy following hip arthroscopy.