Rapid Prototype Zone

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Rapid prototyping for healthcare

Biomedical metallic implants are now commonplace for the replacement of diseased or missing bone and for the fixturing of bone after trauma. Despite their widespread use, these technologies have a number of limitations such as a high elastic modulus and non-optimised design. These limitations ultimately reduce the clinical effectiveness and life-span of the device, which, for treatment of juveniles and young adults, may result in the need for multiple clinical interventions during their lifetime.

There is a real need in the healthcare sector for technologies that can deliver implantable devices that offer a higher level of functionality than is currently available. In particular, their ability to actively stimulate and encourage tissue growth, both after implantation, and during their lifetime; to actively respond of the surrounding tissue and to self-repair the damage, and the ability to be able to tailor these devices to each patients requirements is critical in providing a step change in the quality of patient treatment.

The provision of advanced implant technologies will benefit the patient through improved quality of care, and will benefit society as a whole through the reduced cost of treatment and a reduced burden on the health service.

A solution to achieving customisation and tailorability is the use of Rapid Prototyping (RP) technologies. These enable the digital manufacture of components directly from the design data in a layer-wise fashion. The medical industry represents one of the largest potential users of this technology, with a very wide range of applications, including the manufacture of surgical tools, custom jigs and fixtures and internal and external implants and scaffolds.

Design data may be taken directly from the patient CT or MRI scans and used to process customised, patient-specific fixtures and implants. Until recently, RP has been widely used in the medical sector for the visualisation of defects (tumors, bone trauma etc) and for the planning of operations.

The manufacture of hard customised metallic implants has previously been supported by RP through provision of master patterns for rapid casting processes. More recently though, a new generation of Rapid Manufacturing (RM) technologies have emerged that are capable of direct layer-wise manufacture of customised hard implants.

WMG is actively investigating the direct manufacture of biomedical implants using the Arcam Electron Beam Melting (EBM) RM process, with an emphasis on the free-form manufacture of implants in novel active materials such as shape memory alloy and magnesium-rare earth alloys.

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