World’s First Surgery With In-House Produced Medical 3D Printed Implant

“As far as we know, we are the world’s first to make 3D implants entirely in a hospital, which means that the implants will be better adapted to the patients, right from the start. This will lead to faster surgeries and fewer complications”, Einar Heiberg Brandt says. This first surgery was performed using a hospital-printed cranioplasty implant, where the surgery was part of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ study.

“The surgery was successful. The patient is a 40-year-old woman who, after an accident, needed a cranioplasty. The study hopes to show that the surgeries can be carried out more quickly and that the risk of infections is reduced. Specifically adapted implants also reduce the risk of skin damage and enable our patients to recover faster”, comments Peter Siesjö, consultant in Neurosurgery and Pain Rehabilitation at Skåne University Hospital and professor at Lund University.

Some of the reasons why a patient needs cranioplasty are injuries, tumours and infections. Einar Heiberg Brandt identifies many possibilities with the new method: “This is only the beginning—she said. There are no barriers to writing other types of bone implants.”