3D printing – The Health Care Blog

Ultrasound is Ultra-Cool

Jan 25, 2023

BY KIM BELLARD

AI continues to amaze – ChatGPT is now passing Wharton Business School exams, Microsoft and Google are doubling down in their AI efforts – and I’m as big a fan as anyone, but I want to talk about a technology that has been more under the radar, so to speak: ultrasound.

Yes, ultrasound. Most of us have probably had an ultrasound at some point (especially if you’ve been pregnant) and Dr. Eric Topol continues his years-long quest to replace the ancient stethoscope technology with ultrasound, but if you think ultrasound is just another nifty tool in the imaging toolbox, you’ve missed a lot.

Let’s start with the coolest use I’ve seen: ultrasound can be used for 3D printing. Inside the body.

This news on this dates back to last April, when researchers from Concordia University published their findings in Nature (I found out about it last week). Instead of the more common “Additive Manufacturing” (AM) approach to 3D printing, these researchers use Direct Sound Printing (DSP).

The paper summarizes their results: “To show unique future potentials of DSP, applications such as RDP [Remote Distance Printing] for inside body bioprinting and direct nanoparticle synthesizing and pattering by DSP for integrating localized surface plasmon resonance with microfluidics chip are experimentally demonstrated.”

You Want to 3D Print What

Oct 5, 2021

By KIM BELLARD

You know we’re living in the 21^st century when people are 3D printing chicken and cooking it with lasers. They had me at “3D printing chicken.”

An article in NPJ Science of Food explains how scientists combined additive manufacturing (a.k.a, 3D printing) of food with “precision laser cooking,” which achieves a “higher degree of spatial and temporal control for food processing than conventional cooking methods.” And, oh, by the way, the color of the laser matters (e.g., red is best for browning).

Very nice, but wake me when they get to replicators…which they will. Meanwhile, other people are 3D printing not just individual houses but entire communities. It reminds me that we’ve still not quite realized how revolutionary 3D printing can and will be, including for healthcare.

The New York Times profiled the creation of a village in Mexico using “an 11-foot-tall three-dimensional printer.” The project, being built by New Story, a nonprofit organization focused on providing affordable housing solutions, Échale, a Mexican social housing production company, and Icon, a construction technology company, is building 500 homes. Each home takes about 24 hours to build; 200 have already been built.