Crystal Eye Studio/Shutterstock.com


Materials


New standards


Standard 3D printers can’t extrude the tissue-mimicking materials needed to make lifelike models of human organs. But who said 3D printing had to be standard? Tim Gunn speaks to Richard Arm, flexural composites research fellow at Nottingham Trent University, and Mike McAlpine, associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Minnesota, about their novel approaches to combining 3D printing with advanced materials, and what they might mean for surgical practice and medical device design.


ost professionals can frame their mistakes as learning opportunities and continue to sleep at night. Surgeons have to look for other perks. Just as patients going in for operations do their best not to think about the fallibility of the people that will be performing them, surgeons – trained, paid and feted for saving and improving lives – often struggle to accept that they can make, and perhaps have made, mistakes that harm and kill. Confusion over the rate of medical errors only testifies to their difficulties. In the mid-2000s, the UK’s National Audit Office estimated that patient safety incidents caused somewhere between 840 and 34,000 deaths each year. As per a BMJ paper from 2016, it’s commonly said that medical error is currently the third-leading cause of death in


M Medical Device Developments / www.nsmedicaldevices.com


the US, claiming more than 250,000 lives each year. More recent and less popular analyses put the number of US deaths directly caused by preventable mistakes at less than 10,000. How, statisticians wonder, do you calculate something nobody wants to count? Of course, knowing that a surgeon could recite the precise number of deaths caused by mistakes in similar operations over the past year would hardly fill patients with confidence, either. Surgeons run on self- belief. Fixating on what could go wrong when they cut another living person open would make their jobs altogether impossible. At the same time, all the education in the world won’t make anyone perfect, and there aren’t many ways to practice – to safely make productive mistakes – for a specific operation on a


137


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148  |  Page 149  |  Page 150  |  Page 151  |  Page 152  |  Page 153  |  Page 154  |  Page 155  |  Page 156  |  Page 157  |  Page 158  |  Page 159  |  Page 160  |  Page 161  |  Page 162  |  Page 163  |  Page 164  |  Page 165  |  Page 166  |  Page 167  |  Page 168  |  Page 169  |  Page 170