Oleg Kouzbit, Online News Managing Editor

In a bid to catch up with international medical experience scientists from Far East Federal University are developing their own 3D simulation technology to aid orthopedists and surgeons. In a major several-year effort the university’s spin-off start-up is expected to not only fine-tune prototyping techniques but also do nationwide marketing and sell 3D printing technologies to regional medical markets.

According to Igor Frolov, the project manager and head of Far East Federal University (FEFU)’s department for innovation, the endeavor aims to promote the so-called rapid prototyping—a broad term for automatic construction of physical objects using ‘additive manufacturing’ (3D based) technology—in a range of medical applications, including plastic and oral surgery, orthopedics and implant manufacture.

The project will reportedly take “several years,” during which the development team wants to complete comprehensive market research and start selling 3D simulation services to biomed customers across this country.

Rapid prototyping: from stereolithography to breast augmentation

A core innovative link that brings the R&D and production stages as close to one another as possible, rapid prototyping applies to a wide variety of uses, from visually impressing investors at a presentation to helping developers test and refine a product before taking it to market—and all that at a very limited cost.

Still the waters to test by the majority of Russian physicians, 3D simulation has been known to Western surgeons for more than two decades now. Based on rapid prototyping first developed in 1984 by US engineer Chuck Hull for its stereolithography technique and later improved at MIT for ink-jet printing on powder materials, 3D modeling has found its way to medicine, driven primarily by robust growth of, and strong demand from, cosmetic and plastic surgery and particularly breast augmentation.

3D printing

At the heart of the FEFU-developed rapid prototyping methodology is advanced three-dimensional printing that allows creation of 3D objects from digital file using a materials printer, similarly to the way ordinary printers create images on paper. An object is shaped by laying down successive layers of material.

In the new Far East effort, the researchers seek to enable Russian surgeons to replicate and work on real objects like bones and organs without actually molding them physically. This eases surgeries, saves costs, and might also clear the way for prospective computer-aided tissue engineering—a state-of-the-art application with ink-jet methods used to build body parts and organs.

Higher accuracy, lower costs

Unlike their Western colleagues, Russian surgeons still have to rely on invasive techniques to plan an operation and monitor convalescence. The Far East Federal University project will introduce doctors to quick and fairly inexpensive three-dimensional modeling that elsewhere in the world already assists surgeons in mapping out step-by-step approach to a patient’s problem, enables higher accuracy of implant making, and helps reduce the length of an operation.

The developers hope a patient’s recuperation will also quicken as a doctor’s manual intervention will be minimized. As a result, the innovation is expected to appreciably cut the costs of operation, thus making the plastic and other surgery services much more affordable to Russian populations.

The project team

Set up in 2009 by a special presidential decree, Far East Federal University now incorporates four regional campuses across the vast Primorsky area; another will be built just outside Vladivostok on the island of Russky that is hosting this year’s Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit.

Under the RF’s ten-year expansion program for the university, FEFU will develop a multiple research focus on areas as diverse as oceanic resources, energy saving, nano-systems and nano-materials, transport and logistics, biomed, and interaction with the Asian-Pacific countries.

High hopes

The university is said to be setting up a special spin-off company to realize the project—a possibility that came in 2009 with new federal policy allowing universities to do technology-related business and retain IP rights for their innovation.

Mr. Frolov told media he was expecting increasing demand for this technology as, in line with a global trend, Russian medicine is also evolving to become more patient-specific. With rapid prototyping getting less costly practitioners are likely to embrace the sophisticated and easy-to-apply approach to surgery, the project manager said.