2019 Gumbo final - Book - Page 56
A Leap in Medicine
Standardizing 3D Printing
he medical world has long been looking for
ways to apply 3D printing technology. An
LSU professor may have just found a way.
Director of the Medical Physics Program
Wayne Newhauser and his research team are working
to make 3D printing technology a part of cancer
treatment.
3D printing has the ability to help specialize treatments
for individual patients. It is already providing cheaper
prosthetics for amputees that cater to each patients’
needs.
Doctors are also using 3D models of a patient’s chest,
face or other relevant body part to test potentially
dangerous procedures before treating the patient.
The survival rate of nearly every type of cancer has
greatly increased over the past 25 years due in part to
more effective radiation therapy and chemotherapy,
according to Cancer.org.
Over the past 20 years, cancer treatment and radiation
therapy in particular, which is the delivery of highenergy beams or particles to kill cancer cells, has been
getting more precise in targeting cancer cells and
not healthy cells, according to the American Cancer
Society. However, there are still many cases where
patients are missing certain organs or other body
parts, or have bodies that are usually fragile. For these
patients, radiation therapy needs to be even more
precise or the treatment may kill vital cells and tissues
when trying to hit cancer cells.
“Radiation therapy is very safe and very effective, but
there are some cases where we know that [radiation
therapy] struggles,” ” Newhauser said.
One of the ways doctors have been continuing to
perfect radiation therapy is through testing models
called phantoms. These 3D models simulate a part
of the body like the head, torso or even a full body
model, and effectively serve as a testing dummy for
doctors looking to calculate the correct radiation dose
and placement before administering the treatment to a
live patient. However, these phantoms are not usually
made for a specific patient which presents problems
when dealing with unusual cases.
“If you have a store-bought phantom, it’s going to
look like the average person, and it may not be at all
relevant to [certain patients],” Newhauser said. “You
need to have a phantom that mimics those same
anatomic characteristics [of the patient].”
Newhauser gave the example of a patient whose nose
had been amputated. The standard tools at doctors’
disposal did not allow for the same preciseness as
normal patients.
Newhauser said he hopes to use 3D printing
technology in order to print phantoms for these
patients with unique characteristics. His team is
already able to convert CT scans, which almost every
cancer patient receives, into a set of 3D printing
instructions. From there, all they need is a special
printer and ink to make a phantom specific to the
patient.
As of now, Newhauser and his team have not used this
technology on many patients, and are still in the testing
phase of their research.
“The short-term goal is to show that it’s feasible to do
this,” Newhauser said. “Everyone has known since [the]
get-go that in theory it ought to work, but there’s quite
a difference between being able to recognize that it
will work and being able to demonstrate that it’ll work.
Our goal is to print a whole body, a 3D personalized
phantom that mimics the properties of an actual
patient.”
After their testing phase is complete, Newhauser said
they hope to find a company that can commercialize
what they’ve done, so that 3D-printed phantoms can
become more widely available to patients across the
country.
Story // Benjamin Holden
Photo // Meagan Moore
Design // Catherine Carpenter
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