SAVING A LIFE WITH 3-D PRINTING

SAVING A LIFE WITH 3-D PRINTING. I have posted several times on 3-D printing, including this explanation of how it works. Just about a year ago, I was remarking on how Mary Jane and I found the concept hard to believe. At about the same time (February 2012), doctors were using 3-D printing to save an infant’s life. I first learned about the medical achievement from Instapundit, which linked to the Outside the Beltway blog, but Google gives a number of tear-inducing articles about the event. This article by Matt Peckham on the Time blog has a picture of the infant which adds to the emotional impact. The baby was born with a “condition in which the airway walls are so weak they frequently collapse when breathing or coughing, shutting down the airway.” CPR had to be performed on the baby almost every day, and doctors told the parents that the chances of the baby leaving the hospital alive were “slim”. However, doctors “were able to create a custom splint specifically tailored to fit [the baby], then print it out on a 3D printer.” Because of the 3-D printing, the splint not only fit the baby, but it was created out of a biodegradable material that will be reabsorbed by the child’s body.