Individual patients undergoing hip surgeries have unique anatomies that demand personalized attention by the surgical team. In children, the level of detail is greater and it’s even more crucial to achieve optimal results since the patients will want to run, jump, and swim for many years to come.
Teens and pre-teens, and particularly boys, can suffer from slipped capital femoral epiphysis, a condition in which the head of the femur becomes weak and gets squeezed too much, causing a misalignment of how the femur connects with the pelvis. A procedure known as triplane proximal femoral osteotomy is performed to correct the condition, but because each case is unique, the surgeon has to do a lot of planning and thinking during the surgery to progress forward.
At the University of California San Diego, clinical researches wanted to see whether using 3D printed patient-specific bone models during pre-surgical planning would help speed up the surgery itself. Indeed, in a study of ten patients, the time went down between 38 and 45 minutes when comparing surgeries for which 3D printed models were used and those that were prepped for the old-fashioned way.
Because it now costs just a few dollars to 3D print a patient-specific model of a bone in-house at the hospital, it’s already cheaper than the more than a half hour of time taken up in the OR. Though the researchers didn’t study the resulting quality of the surgeries, they believe them to have been similarly effective. They also believe that the 3D models will be helpful in particularly challenging procedures and for getting new surgeons ready to perform procedures they haven’t done before.
Study in Journal of Children’s Orthopaedics: Patient-specific 3D models aid planning for triplane proximal femoral osteotomy in slipped capital femoral epiphysis…
Via: UC San Diego…
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