Design of a 3D printed surgical guide to assist bone graft surgical interventions

Abstract

3D printing seems to be the tool that will lead personalize medicine in the near future; combined with the potential of medical imaging, now it is possible to use the images of each patient to create 3D specific printed devices that fit perfectly with their anatomy; On the field of trauma and orthopedics, many 3D printed surgical guides are already being commercialized to assist any sort of bone surgeries. However, one of the procedures which still does not have instrumentation support is the harvesting of allografts. Allografts are pieces of bones that are used to be implanted on bone defect lesions with the purpose of recovering its initial anatomy. The graft must be harvested before being implanted to match with the shape of the lesion; this process is still done manually by surgeons so a helper guide to assist the harvesting process would be convenient. In this thesis, I established a protocol for the design of a graft assisted guide in the form of a program that makes the process easier and automatic. The design of the guide was done for a particular case of a patient suffering of anterior shoulder instability. Several guides were designed and 3D printed to be tasted on an in vitro environment. The guides showed perfect fit on the graft and the program reduced the time that was taken to create the guides. Further tests must be performed to ensure the reliability of the guide and some improvements on the software should be performed as well.