The new Digital Anatomy 3D Printer has been designed to recreate the actual tissue response, and is capable of being used anywhere without specialised facilities
Image: 3D printed heart model produced on the new Stratasys J750 Digital Anatomy 3D Printer. Photo: Courtesy of Business Wire.
Israeli 3D printing company Stratasys has announced the launch of its new J750 Digital Anatomy 3D Printer for the medical industry.
Stratasys said that the new digital 3D printer is intended to reproduce the feel, responsiveness, and biomechanics of human anatomy in medical models.
The new system is said to improve the surgical preparedness and training and helps faster marketing of new medical devices.
Stratasys Healthcare business unit head Eyal Miller said: “We believe in the potential of 3D printing to provide better health care, and the Digital Anatomy 3D Printer is a major step forward. We’re giving surgeons a more realistic training environment in no-risk settings.
“We also anticipate this will enable medical device makers to improve how they bring products to market by performing design verification, validation, usability studies and failure analysis with these new models.”
Stratasys 3D printer tested at several organisations
The new Digital Anatomy 3D Printer has been designed to recreate the actual tissue response, and is capable of being used anywhere without specialized facilities, unlike cadavers, animal, traditional, or virtual reality models.
Along with the 3D printer, the company is also introducing three new materials, namely TissueMatrix, GelMatrix, and BoneMatrix used in creating cardiac, vascular, and orthopedic 3D printing applications.
Stratasys expects its new 3D printer to see adoption mainly by medical device companies, and academic medical centres.
The new Digital Anatomy 3D Printer has been tested at the Jacobs Institute medical innovation centre, located in Buffalo, New York, US, to re-create key vascular components for advanced testing and training.
Jacobs Institute chief medical officer Adnan Siddiqui said: “3D printing has been wonderful for recreating patient-specific anatomy compared to cadavers or animal models; however, the final frontier for organ model realism has been live-tissue feel and biomechanical realism.
“That’s exactly what the Digital Anatomy 3D Printer gives us. We believe these models give us the best opportunity to recreate human physiological conditions to simulate actual clinical situations and to study new devices to establish their effectiveness before introducing them to patients.”