By MICHELLE KELLEY, APW reporterFor years, health care providers and patients have been looking for ways to automate their medical procedures, but the technology hasn’t quite reached the point where it can replace traditional medical technology.
The FDA recently approved a 3D printer for medical purposes, and researchers are now trying to build a medical device that could print from scratch.
They say that printing from a living organism can make it more difficult for the body to repair damaged tissue.
“You can take a piece of paper and have a machine print it, but you’re also printing it from a single cell, which is quite fragile,” said Dr. David Ochsner, a researcher at the University of California, San Diego and co-author of the paper that will be published in the medical journal, Lancet, on Wednesday.
“It’s very challenging, but it’s the most feasible approach to printing.”
The team used the 3D-printed printer called a bioelectronics platform to create a device called a prosthesis that could repair tissue damage in a patient’s knee, the team reports in the journal.
The team says the prosthesis can print out in a matter of seconds, without needing to use a printer or any special tools.
The bioelectronic platform, called a microfabricator, was designed to create materials that are easy to clean and can be easily cleaned, with a single injection of a solvent.
A printer in the system can print 3D materials at a rate of less than 100 microns per square inch, or microns.
This means the printer’s print time is only 10 nanoseconds, or milliseconds, compared to the 20 nanosesecs that the average printer is capable of.
The team was able to make a prototype that can print from a human knee, with the aid of a microfluidic system that pumps fluid through the prosthetic.
This microfluids is made up of micro-diameter beads, which the team said could form a mesh around the prosthetics leg.
The microfluoses are then injected into the knee.
The prosthesis has the same form factor as a standard prosthesis, with its main difference being the 3-D printed prosthesis.
The researchers hope that this will help make prosthetic prosthetics more affordable.
They are also looking to expand their prototype to include other prosthetic limbs.
“It’s a pretty complex material that you can actually print a prosthetic limb with,” Ochssner said.
“This technology is a little bit like the first version of the printer.”
The researchers are not the first to use 3D printers to print prosthetic arms.
They also developed the prostheses that can be used in surgery, but this time, the device was 3D printed to be able to print in a human body.
Ochsesner and colleagues also worked on a device that was 3-dimensional printed to enable a patient to print her own skin, which would make it easier for patients to remove their skin for surgery.
Ochsners team has also experimented with creating a 3-d printed prosthetic leg that would allow patients to print their own skin.
It could potentially make prosthetics easier to use, but Ochsdorf and coauthors argue that a prosthetics that would only allow the user to print out skin is not ideal.
