my name is boyd goldie i'm an orthopaedic surgeon,i live and work in north london i see all sorts of patients that have problems with their arms and their shoulders so it covers all sorts of upper limb surgery i ask the radiographers, the technicians,to put the ct scan onto a disc and then i take the disc and you canextract the files, which are dicom files and then import them into the softwareto make the finals for the 3d printer with modern radiology software youcan get a virtual model on-screen you can rotate it but it's still not the sameas holding something in your hands
thinking about where it is in the bodyand how to get there and how to drill, fix, screw, wire, whatever it is you're going to do so this is a model of a shoulder-blade,there's a fracture along here so the whole lower part of the bladehas separated from the top half throughout the operation they hadthis model on the side and they referred to the model to helporientate themselves and work out where they were going with the operationand putting the plates on so this was an unusual fracture andwith the help of a model it was fixed satisfactionally and the patient,i think, got a better outcome
there's two bits, there's the conversion ofthe ct scan to the software for the 3d printer there are companies that sell you software that make itquite easy, but stratospherically expensive but i found that there is actually open sourcefree software that does it, so i can do it myself so you can send the files off to commercial people, but they take two weeks to make the printand they charge hundreds of pounds which is no good if you have a guy who hasa broken wrist and you're gonna operate tomorrow part of it is the patient education and explaining what they've got wrong with them,and appreciating the injury and why i'm going to do what i'm going to do,and a lot of patients find this quite helpful
some patients like it so muchthey ask for a copy of the print a lot of it is to do with helping me,as a surgeon, plan my operation plan where i'm going to make my incision,and have a better understanding of what i'm dealing with, so i don't have any surpriseswhen i come to do the operation if you're making a little bone, it takes an hour if you're making the top of the shin bone,it can take six hours you don't need to see a full-size bone so for big bones you can reduce the size of how much of the bone you print and also you canreduce the actual size so you can make it half-size and for a surgeon that's still enough to seewhat you want to see
and it cuts down on printing time for little bones, sometimes, make them bigger and it takes longer to print, obviously, but then it'seasier to see what you want to see the software is pretty straightforward to use onceyou've mastered the steps
how much does it cost to 3d print an object,i now can take a cd with a scan on it and get to the point of having the file to putin the 3d printer in about 15 minutes i'm hoping that other people will get their own 3d printerand use the software, which doesn't cost anything and do the same thing for their patients
