Find out about a California couple who used a 3-D printed model to convince surgeons to perform an alternative to a risky brain surgery. 

Nancy Crotti

Pamela Scott needed surgery to remove a benign tumor from her brain. Instead of relying on local surgeons to perform a traditional, hugely invasive, and risky procedure, Scott and her husband took matters into their own hands - and a 3-D printer.

The marriage and family therapist from Morro Bay, CA, began furiously researching meningiomas like the one that had grown from her brain's protective covering into the bone near her optic nerve, causing severe headaches.

Meanwhile, her husband, Michael Balzer, used his passion for 3-D printing to make a model of Scott's head and tumor for physicians to examine, according to a report in the couple's hometown paper, New Times. Balzer owns a 3-D design studio in San Luis Obispo.

Using InVesalius, a free medical software program developed in Brazil in 2013, Balzer converted Scott's digital CT and MRI images into a format compatible with 3-D printer software, the New Times story says.

He cut out hundreds of "sliced" CT images to assemble 3-D sagittal models (left and right cross sections of the skull) and renderings of his wife's intact skull and brain. Then he uploaded the renderings, which showed the tumor, onto the online 3-D content sharing site Sketchfab, for neurosurgeons worldwide to review.

In May 2014, surgeons at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center used a micro-drill to remove the tumor by entering Scott's skull through her left eyelid, according to The New Times and the Associated Press.

The surgery took eight hours, recovery a couple of weeks, and Scott's headaches are gone. So are worries she might have lost her senses of sight, taste, and smell, or begun to have seizures-- all possibilities with an old-fashioned craniotomy.

Eyelid surgery is not for everyone, but physicians and researchers continue to find new uses for 3-D printers.

When it comes to 3-D printed anatomical models, some companies, including Leuven, Belgium-based Materialise, have even made a business out of it.

Last year, a study at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston found 3-D printed models of patients' skulls to be helpful when it comes to planning for face transplantation procedures.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH)--together with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, and the National Library of Medicine--has established the NIH 3D Print Exchange, a platform for physicians and researchers to exchange 3-D printable biomedical models. The exchange enables users to convert 3-D medical data from such platforms as the Electron Microscopy Database into 3-D printable files using open-source Chimera software from the University of California, San Francisco. In addition to providing knowledge about chemical or anatomical structures, the site will enable researchers to understand the structure of viruses or proteins and to study surgical planning models.

Even diseases are getting the 3-D treatment. At the University of Rochester (Rochester, NY), researchers are using 3-D printing to study the conditions that cause potentially fatal aortic aneurysms to fail.

These researchers have begun to work with industry in the hope that 3-D printing will become part of the standard for device testing within the next few years.

Nancy Crotti is a contributor to Qmed and MPMN.

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