1. Feasibility of fabricating personalized 3D-printed bone grafts guided by high-resolution imaging
- Author
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Rohit Shinde, Jayaram K. Udupa, Chamith S. Rajapakse, Elizabeth A. Kobe, Olivia M. Teter, Daniel Sipzner, Arbab Khalid, Benjamin T. Newman, Abigail L. Hong, Malika Shukurova, and Robert J. Pignolo
- Subjects
3d printed ,Computer science ,Computed tomography ,02 engineering and technology ,computer.software_genre ,law.invention ,03 medical and health sciences ,0302 clinical medicine ,law ,Voxel ,Medical imaging ,medicine ,Stereolithography ,Bone geometry ,Bone growth ,medicine.diagnostic_test ,Proximal femur ,Mesenchymal stem cell ,030206 dentistry ,Microcomputed tomography ,021001 nanoscience & nanotechnology ,0210 nano-technology ,computer ,Bone volume ,Synthetic bone graft ,Biomedical engineering - Abstract
Current methods of bone graft treatment for critical size bone defects can give way to several clinical complications such as limited available bone for autografts, non-matching bone structure, lack of strength which can compromise a patient’s skeletal system, and sterilization processes that can prevent osteogenesis in the case of allografts. We intend to overcome these disadvantages by generating a patient-specific 3D printed bone graft guided by high-resolution medical imaging. Our synthetic model allows us to customize the graft for the patients’ macro- and microstructure and correct any structural deficiencies in the re-meshing process. These 3D-printed models can presumptively serve as the scaffolding for human mesenchymal stem cell (hMSC) engraftment in order to facilitate bone growth. We performed highresolution CT imaging of a cadaveric human proximal femur at 0.030-mm isotropic voxels. We used these images to generate a 3D computer model that mimics bone geometry from micro to macro scale represented by STereoLithography (STL) format. These models were then reformatted to a format that can be interpreted by the 3D printer. To assess how much of the microstructure was replicated, 3D-printed models were re-imaged using micro-CT at 0.025-mm isotropic voxels and compared to original high-resolution CT images used to generate the 3D model in 32 sub-regions. We found a strong correlation between 3D-printed bone volume and volume of bone in the original images used for 3D printing (R2 = 0.97). We expect to further refine our approach with additional testing to create a viable synthetic bone graft with clinical functionality.
- Published
- 2017