School Notes: School of Engineering & Applied Science
September/October 2013

3-D printers have medical applications

In a year’s time, the 3-D printers at Yale’s Center for Engineering Innovation and Design (CEID) have churned out countless parts, prototypes, and curiosity-driven experiments in plastic—rotorheads and racecar uprights, cardiac pump pieces and thermostats, snowmen, keychains, and fantastical geometric shapes. But the 3-D printers are also being used for cutting-edge medical applications: radiology resident Dr. Mark Michalski uses them to print organs—arteries and bones, a liver, a heart, a knee.

These “printouts” are not mere curiosities. They’re precise three-dimensional replicas of the idiosyncratic, usually diseased, anatomy of specific human patients—unique models that can be helpful to medical students, clinicians, and, Michalski hopes, patients trying to understand what’s happening inside their bodies. Ultimately, Michalski hopes to produce series of 3D anatomical printouts showing the progress of patients’ treatment—a way of communicating that he believes might also help them endure the unpleasant aspects of healing. “If we can demonstrate the way that a tumor has changed with treatment, then we can help patients understand that all the nausea and vomiting wasn’t for naught,” he said of these theoretical cancer patients. “We can say, ‘It reduced the tumor—and I can show you exactly how much.’ Patients could wrap their palms around exact replicas of their own tumors at various stages of shrinkage.”

The CEID has made Yale a more versatile place for experimenters like Michalski by providing both resources and organizational support for skilled but low-key invention: tools, materials, personnel, and space. “Before the CEID there was no avenue for this at Yale,” said Joseph Zinter ’11PhD, the CEID’s assistant director and a lecturer in mechanical engineering and materials science. “Now, a physician at the medical school can say, ‘I have this idea and I’ll go to the CEID to explore it.’ We can help turn a good idea into a physical innovation, a real, tangible thing, and often very fast. For us, this was a natural bridge to the medical community, to influencing patient outcomes.”