3Dprinting

3D Printing in Hospitals – Personalized Care and Better Outcomes

/ Pekka Ketola / Jätä kommentti

3D printing has numerous promising applications in healthcare, particularly in hospitals. This technology enables more personalized and efficient patient care while improving the quality of medical procedures. Let’s look at the present and the future.

Key Applications:

Anatomical Models:
With 3D printing, patient-specific anatomical models, such as those of the heart, kidneys, or prostate, can be created based on CT or MRI scans. These models help surgeons plan complex surgeries with greater precision, enhancing patient safety. They are also valuable for medical students and patients, as they provide a clearer understanding of diseases and human anatomy.

Patient-Specific Instruments and Implants:
3D printing allows the production of custom surgical instruments and implants tailored to individual patients. This is particularly beneficial when standard-sized devices are unsuitable, such as in gynecological instruments or orthopedic implants. Personalized implants improve fit, comfort, and treatment outcomes.

Surgical Planning and Training:
3D-printed models are instrumental in planning and simulating surgeries. Surgeons can practice complex procedures on these models, reducing errors and shortening operation times. Soft models even allow surgeons to feel the structure of organs, offering a realistic training experience.

Patient Communication:
Doctors can use 3D models to explain a patient’s condition and treatment plan. These models help patients better understand their situation, reducing anxiety and fostering trust in their doctors.

Innovative Medical Devices:
3D printing accelerates the development of new medical devices and prototypes. Bioprinting—printing biological tissues—is a particularly promising field that could enable the production of new tissues and organs in the future.

Education:
Medical students and surgeons benefit from 3D-printed models for learning anatomy and practicing various surgical procedures in a realistic and hands-on way.

Future Outlook

Although 3D printing is not yet a standard practice in hospitals, its potential is immense. As the technology evolves and costs decrease, its use in healthcare is expected to become more widespread. Hospitals can invest in their own 3D printers or collaborate with specialized companies to leverage this innovative technology.

Envisioning the Future: AI, Digital Twins, and Personalized Care

The future of healthcare is set to be transformed by the convergence of 3D printing, AI, and digital twin technologies. AI-powered digital twins are expected to create virtual replicas of patients, organs, or systems. These digital twins will allow doctors to simulate a patient’s unique medical profile, predict disease progression, and tailor precision treatments.

For example, digital twins of the human brain could revolutionize the understanding and treatment of neurological diseases. Meanwhile, AI-driven tools integrated into clinical workflows will enable faster, more accurate diagnostics and treatment plans, taking into account genetic, biological, and environmental factors for truly personalized healthcare.

Advancements in genomics, gene editing, and 3D bioprinting will further enhance these capabilities. The synergy of 3D printing with AI and precision medicine could lead to entirely new approaches in patient care, such as the creation of 3D bioprinted organs customized to match a patient’s genetic makeup.

Remote monitoring and telemedicine are also expected to benefit from these advances. AI-powered wearable devices and 5G networks will allow real-time monitoring and virtual consultations, even analyzing subtle changes in speech patterns or activity levels to detect signs of illness early.

As these innovations evolve, they will work alongside 3D printing to make healthcare more efficient, precise, and accessible, paving the way for groundbreaking medical advancements and better patient outcomes.

Sources:

Navigating IPR challenges with generative AI and 3D printing

/ Pekka Ketola / Jätä kommentti

Generative AI and 3D printing are two technologies that together will revolutionize the way new products are designed and manufactured. Generative AI enables the creation of complex and unexpected designs, while 3D printing offers a fast and flexible, almost instant, way to turn these designs into physical products. This combination opens doors to disruptive business models but also brings significant IPR challenges.

Combining design and technical functionality

Products designed with generative AI and 3D printed can combine design and technical functionality in unprecedented ways. This raises questions about how such products should be protected from an intellectual property rights (IPR) perspective. Are they covered by design protection, technical patents, both, or by something else?

Traditional IPR models are not sufficient to cover these next generation products. For example, design protections typically cover the appearance of a product, while patents protect technical innovations. Products created with generative AI can seamlessly combine these two features, making it challenging to separate them.

Too much alike

Generative AI can create 3D models, which can pose significant copyright issues if these models closely resemble existing works. When AI creates a design, how can the maker know that there is no similar product already, or that the AI is not creating almost similar design for someone else at the moment?

This potential for infringement highlights the need for careful consideration and regulation in the use of AI for 3D modeling. Ensuring that AI-generated content does not violate intellectual property rights is crucial to fostering innovation while respecting the rights of original creators.

WIPO’s perspectives

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has addressed the combination of generative AI and 3D printing in several publications, particularly from an IPR perspective. According to WIPO, products designed with generative AI that combine design and technical functionality can pose challenges to traditional IPR models. WIPO emphasizes the importance of developing new guidelines and practices that consider the unique characteristics of these products. It has been proposed that new forms of IPR are needed to take into account the unique features of AI-created works and the rapid innovations enabled by 3D printing. This could mean new patent classes or expanding design protection to cover AI-created products.

Summary

Generative AI and 3D printing offer enormous opportunities for innovation and new business models. At the same time, they bring significant IPR challenges that require new approaches and collaboration among experts from different fields. It is clear that we need new IPR models and practices that consider the unique features of these technologies and enable their full potential to be realized.

How do you see the impact of generative AI and 3D printing on IPR?

#GenerativeAI #3DPrinting #additivemanufacturing #IPR #Innovation #Technology

Sources:

  1. WIPO Patent Landscape Report on Generative AI (2024)
  2. WIPO Key Findings on Generative AI (2024)
  3. WIPO: Navigating Intellectual Property (2024)
  4. Berggren: Generatiivinen tekoäly ja siihen liittyvien IPR/juridisten riskien hallinta (2023)
  5. WIPO: 3D printing and the intellectual property system (2015)

Functional products

/ Pekka Ketola / 1 kommentti

What is the next generation of 3D printed products?

When the first applications of commercial 3D printing emerged, they were mostly about appearance models and prototypes. These are still, and will be, powerful and valuable applications in many businesses. During the past 10 years we have seen radical development in design tools, materials, 3D printing technologies and skills. 3D printing is now serious and reliable manufacturing method for end products, product series and spare parts in all industries. We have 3D printed products that are beautiful, optimized in many ways and serve perfectly for the intended purposes.

Is this the end of evolution? Not even close! We only start to have a good platform to imagine the future systems, after practising the technology basics and having a vague understanding of what we can make. So, here is my vision for the next generation products, made with the help of 3D printing.

“The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.

– William Gibson –

Examples

  1. Interactive products will merge different technologies seamlessly, and interact with the user, system or environment in many levels. This future window is cracked open by Anouk Wipprecht. Products like Spider Dress or Proximity Dress show how products can sense and react to data or different signals from the environmnent.
  2. Personal amplifiers will give new capabilities to people. Paralympian athletes already use 3D printed prosthetes and appliances to support with a given sport, for example to run faster with spring-like artifical legs. Exosceletons are used to help lifting heavy weights. When this opportunity develops to the next level, we will build products that give us strength, better senses or capabilites never seen before. In the future we may have bionic olympics that drive the development of personal amplifiers in the same ways as Formula 1 races drive the development of better cars.
  3. New vehicles. In 1950’s the dream of a flying car emerged. Now we start to have manned drones. There are many obstacles slowing down the wider adoption, such as manufacturing cost, safety, regulation and non-existing traffic management systems for these small manned vehicles. Putting obstacles aside, let’s just ask, is it doable to make low cost flying vehicle? The concept was presented by Janne Kyttänen in his vision about 3D printed manned drone. By using suitable materials and careful optimized design, the body of the vehicle can be 3D printed in few hours with a large format 3D printer. The rest is about putting electronics, motors and other components automatically in place.
3D printed manned drone. Model 3D printed by 3DStep. Design by Janne Kyttänen.

The making of functional products

The next generation products will be based on strong systemic view. It is not about having perfect components, optimized for specific features, such as cooling or minimizing materials, but about justifying the whole reason for a product the be realised. We can make optimized components for an airplane for saving weight, or we can design new categories of sustainable flying vehicles.

The next generation products will gracefully ignore the boundaries of sciences. Rich multidisciplinary knowledge is applied to achieve the goals, such as making technology products that react with biosignals and apply artificial intelligence to perform better in a certain social context.

We will master the whole spectrum of available materials. Already today 3D printers can use an unbelievable range of materials, from living cells to tailored metal alloys. New materials emerge practically every day with amazing features. Making of the next generation functional products is not about if there is suitable materials available, but being able to define which features we want want to have in the products.

Strategic guidelines

What steps we should take towards the next generation functional products?

Collaboration is the key. Now we simply need to take collaboration into new levels. This happens by global ventures, connecting individuals, teams and developers with the help of smart development platforms. Facilitating trust between stakeholders is a mandatory activity.

Maximize creativity and imagination. Development projects are often defined by business case or ROI. The are often justified, but to maximise creativity and innovation we need more value based motivators. We, as humans, get fundamentally motivated by other things than money, especially when we face the opportunity to create radically new.

Extreme multidisciplinarity. As mentioned earlier, we need to ignore the boundaries of sciences. Products and systems of the future use the best of what humans or nature have ever invented. A powerful way to guide the development is to establish global development funds that require connecting sciences in unexpected ways. In local level great examples are, for example, hacker and maker communities, such as biocurious.org, which are based on citizen science, curiousity and co-learning.

Lets’ make it.

Pekka Ketola, February 18, 2021

CEO 3DStep Oy & Ideascout Oy. Innovator. LinkedIn