Innovative design technology: An optimal surgical aid system for Hip Resurfacing Arthroplasty

Hip Resurfacing Arthroplasty (HRA) is a treatment option for the patients with the advanced hip disease; it is considered as the most technically difficult techniques of all procedures recommended for osteonecrosis of the hip. Technically, the currently applied HRA surgeries lead to unstable and inconsistent results. Surgeons rely a lot on the manual technique and conventional tools as well as their skills to determine the right drilling angle for locating the implant system. Although the robotic and surgical planning systems are available for HRA, the drilling line is still defined geometrically and intra-operatively, not fully considering about the biomechanics aspects of the implant and bone structure. In this paper, an optimal surgical aid system for HRA is proposed. With the integration of the state of the art biomedical modelling, pre-operative planning and personalised surgical tools, knowledge based and expert system, as well as biomechanics modelling and analysis, the precision, safety and speed of surgery are improved, the complexity of surgery is reduced, and therefore the survival rate of the implant is increased. Especially, the proposed system provides a cheap and practically feasible solution with the integration of expertise from both engineering and medicine for improving the treatment quality of the patients

Personalised ankle-foot orthoses design based on reverse engineering

Drop Foot (DF) and Food Drop í an interchangeable term that describes an abnormal neuromuscular disorder that affects the patient's ability to raise their foot at the ankle. Ankle-Foot Orthoses (AFOs) are devices intended to assist or to restore the motions of the ankle-foot complex. In this paper, personalised AFO development which is based on 3D models of the patient's ankle-foot complex is introduced. Methods of reconstructing 3D models of the ankle-foot based on Reverse Engineering were fully investigated from which the new personalised AFOs were proposed. These AFOs were designed to assist the ankle flexion-extension for DF patients

Personalised medical product development: methods, challenges and opportunities

Personalised health care in general and personalised medical products in particular aim to provide the optimal diagnosis and treatment with the use of the right medicine, tools and devices to the right patient at the right time in order to meet well technical and clinical requirements as well as individual characteristics of each patient. It offers the increased effectiveness and better patient safety, and finally to obtain the best diagnosis and treatment quality. In this paper, the area of personalised medical product design and development is emphasised with the focus on design and manufacturing of implants, surgical tools, medical devices, orthotics and prostheses. State of the art technologies, methods and resources for developing personalised medical products are presented in which challenges and opportunities are addressed and discussed

Medical rapid prototyping applications and methods

Purpose – Aims to investigate medical rapid prototyping (medical RP) technology applications and methods based on reverse engineering (RE) and medical imaging data. Design/methodology/approach – Medical image processing and RE are applied to construct three-dimensional models of anatomical structures, from which custom-made (personalized) medical applications are developed. Findings – The investigated methods were successfully used for design and manufacturing of biomodels, surgical aid tools, implants, medical devices and surgical training models. More than 40 medical RP applications were implemented in Europe and Asia since 1999. Research limitations/implications – Medical RP is a multi-discipline area. It involves in many human resources and requires high skills and know-how in both engineering and medicine. In addition, medical RP applications are expensive, especially for low-income countries. These practically limit its benefits and applications in hospitals. Practical implications – In order to transfer medical RP into hospitals successfully, a good link and close collaboration between medical and engineering sites should be established. Moreover, new medical applications should be developed in the way that does not change the traditional approaches that medical doctors (MD) were trained, but provides solutions to improve the diagnosis and treatment quality. Originality/value – The presented state-of-the-art medical RP is applied for diagnosis and treatment in the following medical areas: cranio-maxillofacial and dental surgery, neurosurgery, orthopedics, orthosis and tissue engineering. The paper is useful for MD (radiologists and surgeons), biomedical and RP/CAD/CAM engineers

Medical Product Development: Methods, Challenges and Opportunities

International audienc