While the concept and practice of 3D printing lifelike organs has been around for years (and adopted by health organizations like the Mayo Clinic), a 17-person research team—of which all but three are located at the U—claim they have made a significant advancement in the technology’s capabilities.
Instead of using hard plastics or rubbers to print their organ replicas, researchers from the U, as well as Cornell University and the University of Washington, developed customized silicone-based inks they said could be “tuned” to match an individual patient’s tissue. (In the case of this study, which was published in the journal Advanced Materials Technologies, researchers made samples based on three patients’ prostates.)
From their experiment, the researchers were able to produce patient-specific organ models that mimicked the exact anatomical structure, mechanical properties and the look and feel of real organs. Each model also included soft sensors that the researchers believe could help surgeons anticipate how an organ could react to various surgical tools.
http://tcbmag.com/news/articles/2017/december/researchers-led-by-u-of-m-develop-new-technology-t
