3D Printing

In December, we asked Medical Design Briefs readers to cast their ballot to choose from our 12 Products of the Month the technology they felt was the most significant new introduction to the design engineering community in 2016. The selected products reflect advances that enable new innovations in medical technology. Here are...

Researchers in MIT’s Media Lab, Cambridge, MA, have created “Cilllia,” a new computational method for designing and 3D printing artificial hair. 3D printers have been unable to print hair, fur, and other dense arrays of extremely fine features that require a huge amount of computational time and power.

Using an inexpensive 3D printer, biomedical engineers at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, say that they have developed a custom-fitted, implantable device with embedded sensors that could treat cardiac disorders.

Doctors at Children’s National Medical Center, Washington, DC, are creating new hearts to help cardiac surgeons. Not actual hearts, but three-dimensional synthetic models using a 3D printer. The only one of its kind at a Washington area hospital, the printer uses scans from individual patients to replicate...

Researchers say that a new type of soft material they have created by using a unique 3D printer connects thousands of water droplets, 50 microns in diameter each, encapsulated within lipid (fat) films, which can perform some of the functions of the cells inside our bodies. These printed “droplet networks,” they say...

3D printers have the potential to quickly produce complex structures and materials — including bone scaffolds, if Washington State University scientists have their way. An interdisciplinary team of chemistry, materials science, biology, and manufacturing researchers produced a bone-like material using a 3D printer.