Scientists want to treat complex bone fractures with a bone-healing gun - Ars Technica
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In more complex bone problems like severe, irregular fractures or resections done as part of bone cancer treatment, the bone won’t heal on its own. The most common means of stabilizing the injured site and making recovery possible is metal-based grafts, implants usually made with titanium alloys.
The problem with such implants is that they are difficult and expensive to manufacture, and it’s very hard to make them patient-specific. “3D printing has been highlighted as a novel approach to make such personalized implants, but this also requires substantial time and money,” said Jung Seung Lee, a biomedical engineering researcher at the Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. So his team wanted to find a way to make bone implants that would be faster and cheaper than a 3D printer.
What they came up with was a modified glue gun. The idea was to make the implant right at the injured site during surgery. The surgeon would point the bone-healing gun at the fractured bone, pull the trigger, and create a stabilizing scaffold by extruding a filament that would solidify in the fracture and hold the bone together. “It was basically a tweaked commercially available hot glue gun. We modulated the temperature, and by adjusting the tip module, we could control the resolution of the extruded scaffold,” Lee said.
Coming up with the gun design, though, was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out the ammo.
Scientists want to treat complex bone fractures with a bone-healing gun
It’s a bit like a handheld 3D printer, with all the accuracy challenges that implies.
Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
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System shared this topic
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In more complex bone problems like severe, irregular fractures or resections done as part of bone cancer treatment, the bone won’t heal on its own. The most common means of stabilizing the injured site and making recovery possible is metal-based grafts, implants usually made with titanium alloys.
The problem with such implants is that they are difficult and expensive to manufacture, and it’s very hard to make them patient-specific. “3D printing has been highlighted as a novel approach to make such personalized implants, but this also requires substantial time and money,” said Jung Seung Lee, a biomedical engineering researcher at the Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. So his team wanted to find a way to make bone implants that would be faster and cheaper than a 3D printer.
What they came up with was a modified glue gun. The idea was to make the implant right at the injured site during surgery. The surgeon would point the bone-healing gun at the fractured bone, pull the trigger, and create a stabilizing scaffold by extruding a filament that would solidify in the fracture and hold the bone together. “It was basically a tweaked commercially available hot glue gun. We modulated the temperature, and by adjusting the tip module, we could control the resolution of the extruded scaffold,” Lee said.
Coming up with the gun design, though, was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out the ammo.
Scientists want to treat complex bone fractures with a bone-healing gun
It’s a bit like a handheld 3D printer, with all the accuracy challenges that implies.
Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
Was wondering about this bit, but they covered it in the end.
“It is true that the system requires practice,” Lee said. “We may need to integrate it with a guiding mechanism that would position the head of the device precisely. This could be our next-gen bone printing device.”
I'm picturing some form of targeting with a variable width laser. Dot one: start here, dot two: stop here, make it this wide, rinse and repeat.
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In more complex bone problems like severe, irregular fractures or resections done as part of bone cancer treatment, the bone won’t heal on its own. The most common means of stabilizing the injured site and making recovery possible is metal-based grafts, implants usually made with titanium alloys.
The problem with such implants is that they are difficult and expensive to manufacture, and it’s very hard to make them patient-specific. “3D printing has been highlighted as a novel approach to make such personalized implants, but this also requires substantial time and money,” said Jung Seung Lee, a biomedical engineering researcher at the Sungkyunkwan University in Korea. So his team wanted to find a way to make bone implants that would be faster and cheaper than a 3D printer.
What they came up with was a modified glue gun. The idea was to make the implant right at the injured site during surgery. The surgeon would point the bone-healing gun at the fractured bone, pull the trigger, and create a stabilizing scaffold by extruding a filament that would solidify in the fracture and hold the bone together. “It was basically a tweaked commercially available hot glue gun. We modulated the temperature, and by adjusting the tip module, we could control the resolution of the extruded scaffold,” Lee said.
Coming up with the gun design, though, was the easy part. The hard part was figuring out the ammo.
Scientists want to treat complex bone fractures with a bone-healing gun
It’s a bit like a handheld 3D printer, with all the accuracy challenges that implies.
Ars Technica (arstechnica.com)
Cool, but teach me about that fuckin chonker of a glue gun.
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Cool, but teach me about that fuckin chonker of a glue gun.
It requires some serious juice. Bone healing juice, to be precise.
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It requires some serious juice. Bone healing juice, to be precise.
Came here for a bone hurting juice gag, was not disappointed.
