3D Printed Anatomy
Monash University in Australia is releasing their new 3D printed anatomy series. The press release is here… http://www.monash.edu.au/news/show/3d-printed-anatomy-to-mark-a-new-era-for-medical-training
And if you can access the full article, more details about it are published here…
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ase.1475/abstract
And I first heard about it through Meddeviceonline’s article which contains the following photo. If that is an actual comparison of cadaver and the plastic version being made by Monash, well that’s really impressive…
http://www.meddeviceonline.com/doc/world-s-first-d-printed-cadaver-could-revolutionize-medical-education-0001
Most of these articles talk about the value of having these models as a replacement for human dissection all together in classes. I don’t think that a complete replacement will ever be a good idea, certainly not anytime soon. But a really accurate model like this, could be incredibly valuable used in addition to cadaver studies. Which leaves me wondering exactly how they’re getting it.
The abstract of the scholarly article mentions injecting contrast into specific anatomy to highlight it for the scans. That would certainly help, but I’ve seen enough CT data to know that it’s going to come out with a lot of mess too. Whoever is going through and isolating this piece from that and isolating the model is doing a fine job of it. That’s for sure.
I’ve had a bit of fascination for the last couple of years with the idea of making educational models that can be printed out in 3D on the user’s part. This is definitely more complicated than that, and they are not suggesting that students try to print their own. But I feel like that’s around the corner. And it’s exciting.