Co-presenters Robert Ducey of LAIKA Studios and Nicholas Jacobson of the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus on stage at AMUG 2023
It's day two of the Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG) Conference and a curious row of bright yellow Play-Doh boxes awaits attendees at the doors of the Hilton Chicago's Grand Ballroom. Co-presenters Robert Ducey of LAIKA Studios and Nicholas Jacobson of the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus are about to open the day with a joint keynote that exemplifies what the annual meeting of 3D printing users is supposed to be all about: making connections and sharing knowledge.
The miniature pots of colourful, squidgy stuff start to make sense as Jacobson asks the audience to take a piece of paper and fashion it into a brain. Some attendees get pretty creative with shredding and folding in the 60 seconds given but few, from where I'm sitting at least, resemble anything like the brain on the big screen in front of us. This, Jacobson explains, goes some way to illustrating the limitations in using 2D imagery, which the healthcare sector has long relied on, to inform complex medical procedures. With the Play-Doh however, what's clear from the rainbow blobs held in hands around the room, each more closely resembling the heart model Jacobson has tasked the audience with replicating, is that "new modelling techniques open up new opportunities."
It was back at the AMUG Conference in 2019, the last time these two speakers spent time in person, where an opportunity presented itself. Ducey is the technical supervisor for the Rapid Prototyping department at LAIKA, the animation studio known for stop-motion films such as ParaNorman, Kubo and the Two Strings and Missing Link, and also one of the headline companies on the AMUG keynote line-up that year. It was there where the two first met and began a seemingly unlikely collaboration that would lead to new 3D modelling and 3D printing applications for medicine.
While medical is the focus today, Jacobson's work spans architecture, fashion (those famous Met Gala 3D printed garments no less), regenerative medicine, and structural engineering. A member of the translational research faculty at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Jacobson is trained as both an architect and computational designer. To date, he has worked with over 50 surgeons on new designs for patient-specific solutions in diagnostics, prosthetics, and implants, and it's these applications where the opportunities presented by voxel-level printing provide, as Jacobson tells the audience, "the ability to fabricate fine features with effortless complexity."
Over in Portland, LAIKA Studios has been working with additive manufacturing since its 2009 feature film, Coraline, where the team pioneered the use of 3D printing in replacement animation, printing 20,000 faces with PolyJet and largely hand painting to finish. For its most recent release Missing Link in 2019, that number grew to 102,000 3D printed faces, leveraging the colour capabilities of a Stratasys J750 machine and minimal post-processing.
Reunited at the AMUG 2023 Conference, as the two talk about their chance meeting in 2019, you may still wonder how an Oscar-winning animation studio and a trained architect turned Surgical and Clinical Design researcher might make for such a pairing, but that crossover between bitmap printing and medical imaging was clear, and as Ducey recalls, offered up a "great opportunity for collaboration."
And the evidence is all up on screen. Strangely beautiful, vibrant images show digital cross sections of patient data, captured in 2x, 4x and 10x voxel level clarity, to help surgeons better understand how to move through the brain during surgery. For one little girl named Miracle with a heart that Jacobson describes 'one in a million', the technology permits a level of detail that affords greater understanding of her condition, and gives surgeons the necessary tools to deliver better outcomes.
An unlikely collaboration between an animation studio and clinical design researcher
The question that's guided the work is ‘how can we represent the body better than anything else that’s out there?’ The next level, which they're now working on is, how to use the technology to create solutions that actually touch the body. To get there, Jacobson has developed a solution for children with cleft palette, similar to Invisalign's incremental teeth aligners, which can eliminate the number of surgeries children go through for treatment (typically three over their lifetime), and eliminate the manual process of taking weekly moulds, along with long trips to the hospital. To turn this into a truly digital workflow, Jacobson says they want to build a system to automate the process. Fortunately, Ducey, with years of experience pushing the technical boundaries of 3D printing for the film industry, already had a set of tools that could be applied to this exact problem.
"This," Ducey concludes, 'is what the conference is all about." It's 'the same world', the same software, but two completely different areas of impact.
Jacobson said they're now taking those learnings and applying to heart conditions within children, using voxel printing to create tangible printed solutions with microstructures that could eventually provide the ability to open up a cellular response. They've secured the funding, it's still in the early stages, and Jacobson is cautious not to promise on how successful they will be, but the work is being done.
It's "the last frontier of what we’re working on," Jacobson adds, "… for now."
