If you’re familiar with the TV show The Pitt, you’ll know it provides a very realistic – at times, very gory – hour-byhour study of a single day at a Pittsburgh emergency room, complete with acronyms and medical jargon thrown out at 100mph. In season two, things get even more real, as a new chief attending physician comes onto the scene with bold ideas about introducing new technologies onto the ward.
New technologies, you say? The 3D printing radar, instinctively, goes off. Alas, by episode 15, the final hour of the shift, no mention. But as a recent visit to Materialise’s HQ, where the company was hosting its annual healthcare forum, proved, 3D printing is but one part of a maturing mix of digital solutions aimed at providing better patient care.
I sat down with Scott Hollister, a Biomedical Engineer and Professor of Bioengineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Fleur de Geer, a Technical Physician at the Verwelius 3D Lab and a PhD candidate in Head and Neck Oncology and Surgery at the Antoni van Leeuwenhoek, alongside Brigitte de VetVeithen, CEO of Materialise, to discuss how they’re actively applying 3D planning and printing technologies today, and what it actually takes to successfully integrate a new technology into a healthcare environment.
TCT: Can you tell us a little bit about how you’re using 3D technologies today?
Fleur: I’m the bridge between the engineer and the surgeon. We work with Materialise software on a daily basis. So we use Mimics to convert our 2D imaging data into 3D models to perform the 3D planning and also do some 3D printing.
