Engineers at GE Healthcare are working on easing the process of 3D printing model organs for doctors and patients to review before and after surgeries. These days it’s a slow process hampered by the enormous amounts of data a CT scanner produces and the post-processing that is required to create a file that can be sent to the printer.
Since GE has been making CT scanners for ages and is now in the business of building 3D printers, via its new division called GE Additive, the engineers and computer scientists from the two teams have joined forces. They hope to soon make available to hospitals a system that will turn CT scans directly into physical objects with little effort on the clinical team. Potentially, a scan would follow a radiologist’s interpretation while the 3D printer creates the model, and the patient would get an easy to understand explanation of what’s what all in one visit.
“Today, when people print organs, it can take anywhere from a week to three weeks to manipulate the data,” said Jimmie Beacham, chief engineer for advanced manufacturing at GE Healthcare “We want to do it with a click of a button.”
Via: GE Healthcare…