3D to the Rescue in Complex Spine Surgery

When a surgeon is faced with a novel situation, a problem for which he does not have a doable answer, what device is he most apt to turn to for a solution? If you guessed a 3D printer, you were correct. Ralph Mobbs, M.D., a neurosurgeon at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney, Australia, had a patient who suffered from a virulent form of cancer known as chordoma.

The patient was a man in his 60s and the tumor was in a particularly hard to reach location. Mobbs told Mashable writer Ariel Bogle that at the top of the neck, there are two highly specialized vertebrae that are involved in the flexion and rotation of the head. “His tumor had occupied those two vertebrae, ” explained Mobbs. Without treatment, the tumor would slowly compress the brain stem and spinal chord, causing quadriplegia. “It’s a particularly horrible way to go, ” Mobbs told Bogle.

Mobbs faced a difficult decision. He knew that there have been only a few attempts to treat this type of tumor surgically because of its location and the high risk involved. Doctors would have to remove bone from another part of the patient’s body and it was nearly impossible to get a good fit. So Mobbs decided to turn to 3D-printing. “[With 3D printing], the patient could be supplied with a custom-printed body part to achieve the goals of the surgery much better than we previously have had in our bag of tricks, ” he said.

According to Bogle, to make the part, Mobbs worked with an Australian medical device company named Anatomics Pty Ltd. The company made the implant from titanium. The company also printed several models of the patient’s exact anatomy for the doctor so he was able to practice the surgery before he went into the operating theatre. The surgery, he said, “was just a pure delight. It was as if someone had switched on a light and said ‘crikey, if this isn’t the future, well then I don’t know what is’.”

While surgeons have been using 3D-printed implants for a number of years, Mobbs believes the surgery that he performed is a world first for these particular vertebrae in the neck. “To be able to get the printed implant that you know will fit perfectly because you’ve already done the operation on a model…it was just a pure delight, ” he said.

The surgery took more than 15 hours to complete. The patient is recovering well, according to Mobbs. Mobbs is certain the use of 3D-printing in medicine will increase exponentially. “There’s no doubt this is the next big wave of medicine, ” he told Bogle. “For me, the holy grail of medicine is the manufacturing of bones, joints and organs on-demand to restore function and save lives.” He believes that within his lifetime doctors will be making 3D discs for spine patients and a pancreas for a diabetic.