Week 5

This week went by so quickly that it is hard to believe it is already Friday. As per usual, the OR was very interesting in Plastic Surgery. I was also able to do some work on the newly ordered 3D printer.

I saw two new biomedical devices this week. The first device was for a patient who had three fractures near the eye and cheekbone. Three similar implants were inserted through the eye and were screwed into the misaligned bones. This stabilized the bone and will keep everything in the proper location while it heals. During this surgery, I also learned that people who wear brown scrubs in the OR are representatives for the company that provided the biomaterial being used. The person representing Stryker during this surgery instructed and advised the surgeons as well as the surgical assistants on what screws and instruments should be used to properly insert the metallic implants.

The second device was called a dermatome (image shown below). It can be used during surgery to take a thin skin graft from a donor site and is connected to a source of nitrogen. In this particular case, the patient had a tumor removed from the tongue. Using skin from the wrist, the tongue was repaired. Then a thin layer of skin from the thigh was removed using the dermatome and was used to repair the wrist donor site. This was done to match the skin in each location as closely as possible.

Dermatome Device Market 2020 Global Size, Growth, Emerging Technologies, Regional Trends, Sales Revenue, Key Players, Future Plans and Opportunity Assessment by 2027 | Medgadget 

The new 3D printer, an Ender3 Pro, came in this week. With Shoufei's help, the printer was quickly assembled and put to work. We experimented together on the parameters for polycaprolactone (PCL), which is a compatible material that is 3D printable but requires additional tuning to print successfully. We started printing a piece for an on-going project in the lab. This part would be used in a rhinoplasty and was designed for a specific patient with a porous texture. The image below shows the PCL scaffold (left) compared to the PLA (right) scaffold. While the shape and height is similar, the PCL material has holes in the structure as well as collapsed pores, meaning that there is more work to be done to fully optimize PCL for this scaffold. We will soon change the nozzle size from 0.4mm to 0.2mm to see if this improves the resolution of the print.


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