Logitech and Realize Medical Partner to Enhance Medical VR

Canadian medical virtual reality (VR) startup Realize Medical has announced a collaboration with Logitech, a renowned Swiss-based manufacturer of computer accessories and software. The partnership is designed to enhance Realize Medical’s Elucis, the world’s first platform for building patient-specific 3D medical models entirely in VR, by integrating Logitech’s enterprise-focused VR Stylus, enabling users to draw medical models precisely and directly in the program.

Through this new joint effort, Realize Medical will take the Elucis platform’s medical image viewing, modeling, and communication capabilities to the next level by combining novel 3D visualizations with the familiar and intuitive input of a hand-held stylus on a writing surface. Based entirely on VR, Elucis lets users turn medical images into 3D medical models with ease for 3D printing and other advanced visualization applications. While Logitech’s VR Ink Pilot Edition stylus, released last December, offers a more natural and precise input modality for a handful of art and design-focused VR tools. Together, the software and the pen will open new capabilities and improve usability.

“We are constantly on the lookout for innovative ways to improve our Elucis platform, and this partnership with Logitech does just that,” said Justin Sutherland, CEO and co-founder of Realize Medical. “Giving users the ability to draw seamlessly within our program will greatly improve the user experience, bringing us closer to meeting our mission of providing healthcare professionals with the 3D modeling tools they need to improve patient care and education.”

It takes a long time to make 3D anatomical models on 2D platforms, which is why Sutherland and Dan La Russa, Realize co-founders and medical physicists at the Ottawa Hospital, in Canada, began looking for a way to make the whole process easier. In 2017. they began working on creating a VR platform to help clinical physicians make 3D models faster, and in January of 2019, they took their work to the next level by creating a medical VR startup as a spin-out company out of the Ottawa Hospital.

Combining Logitech’s VR Ink Pilot Edition stylus with Realize Medical’s Elucis software to create 3D models (Image courtesy of Realize Medical)

Two-dimensional imaging, such as computerized tomography (CT) scans or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), has been around since 1972. Although the resolution of the images has improved, it remains relatively the same technology with physicians still using the “slices” shown on 2D images for educational purposes and diagnosing patients. But even though medical imaging data represents 3D structures and can be turned into tangible physical 3D models, Realize Medical believes that many clinical settings and private companies are still relying on 2D tools to create 3D models, which is time-consuming and tedious. Instead, Elucis is expected to provide surgeons and healthcare professionals with a radically new way to create 3D medical content, much quicker and accurately.

The patent-pending input method lets users draw, measure, and annotate directly on any given view of an image, allowing for the creation to “materialize” in front of the user, offering the ability to work on it, hands-on. Thanks to intuitive hand motions and true 3D visual cues Realize Medical developed an image navigation tool that unlocks medical images and can even construct and edit 3D structures from 2D contours. 

Realize Medical’s Elucis software will help the healthcare field create 3D models (Image courtesy of Realize Medical)

This new collaboration is the latest in a breakthrough trend of VR and 3D medical modeling aiming to change the future of healthcare. According to the startup, virtual reality can play a variety of important roles in healthcare and medicine, and the Elucis platform, in particular, can act as a clinician’s education and training tool, help with patient-specific planning, have the potential to guide treatment decisions, and much more. The company founders consider that shortly conventional monitor displays will be replaced by modern mixed reality tools like VR, augmented reality (AR), and medical 3D printing. To that end, the partnership continues to upgrade the technological platform offering user-friendly tools to healthcare experts. 

Innovation in healthcare through 3D printing has led to the development of new applications. With hospitals and clinical settings looking to incorporate new ways to create medical models and devices in-house, the demand for technologies that can change the status quo continues to grow. In the last years, we have seen many healthcare institutions working together with researchers, startups, and companies to create bespoke clinical products, from surgical guides to patient-specific implants and 3D printed anatomical models, that can improve patient experience and surgical planning, as well as reduce operating time and costs. The role of mixed VR and 3D printing technologies is shaping up to be a staple for modern healthcare applications, as key development to advance the medical field.

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VA Puget Sound Initiative: Advancing 3D printing for Heart Disease

For over one hundred years, treating heart disease meant opening the patient’s chest to access the heart through open-heart surgery. The procedure usually takes between three to six hours and is associated with a lot of pain and suffering as well as possible surgical complications. On top of that, the patient has to be in good health to withstand the operation. However, throughout the last few years, the use of minimally invasive surgery has become extremely important for patients who are at intermediate or higher risk for death or major complications during the procedure. And just last month the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the procedure for low-risk patients who need to replace damaged valves. This was a big deal, since aortic stenosis is the most common valvular heart disease in the US, afflicting up to 1.5 million people, and many of them couldn’t or didn’t want to have open-heart surgery, so there were very few options for them. Still, if you thought things couldn`t get any better, try adding 3D printing to the equation. That’s just what the researchers and physicians at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System are doing, using 3D printing to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of complex heart conditions.

Recently, the VA Puget Sound (part of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs)  and the University of Washington (UW) School of Medicine announced a two-year partnership to develop new uses of 3D printing that could help cardiologists better visualize the complex anatomy unique to each patient and improve access to new minimally invasive treatments. This type of surgery has already proven to help reduce health care costs by hundreds of millions of dollars every year, also making surgery safer by lowering the suffering associated with surgical complications, and now with 3D printing things can become easier for everyone involved.

The two organizations will share 3D printers, 3D materials, software and a staff made up of physicians, researchers and engineers, to quickly develop new protocols for planning procedures such as the creation of patient-specific 3D printed models for treatment of mitral valve disease—a complex heart abnormality that prevents blood from flowing properly out from the heart to the rest of the body.

“3D printing can benefit many aspects of structural heart disease, including disease affecting any of the four valves of the heart (aortic, mitral, tricuspid and pulmonic). Each valve has a different structure and different challenges to an interventional approach, and this is where being able to visualize that anatomy with 3D printing can really make a difference,” explained Beth Ripley, VA Puget Sound radiologist, to 3DPrint.com

The VA Puget Sound Health Care System facility in Seattle

The VA is the largest integrated healthcare system in the United States and has one of the most extensive hospital-based 3D printing networks. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) 3D printing network is already seeing first-hand the many benefits of 3D printing, everything from model kidneys to informing pre-surgical planning for veterans with renal cancer, and even specialized foot orthotics that help prevent avoidable amputations for veterans with type 2 diabetes. Cardiologists will soon be able to prepare even better for upcoming procedures and help their patients understand what type of treatment and surgery they’ll be getting, via life-sized 3D models of their own heart.

Ripley went on to say that “3D printed medical models can facilitate patient understanding and informed consent, training of physicians, diagnosis of disease and surgical planning. The next frontier will be exploration of patient-matched implants and surgical cutting guides. Finally, we are exploring bioprinting, which is 3D printing of structures that can support or are composed of living cells.”

Both, UW Medicine and VA Puget Sound use Materialise Mimics 3D printing software, which is medically cleared and GE Advanced Workstation Volume Share software. Both institutions have a wide variety of 3D printers at hand. The VA Puget Sound is equipped with:

  • Stratasys F370 FDM printer
  • Stratasys Mojo FDM printer
  • Stratasys Objet 30 Prime polyjet printer
  • Stratasys Objet 350 Connex3 polyjet printer
  • Formlabs Form2 vat photopolymerization (SLA) printer

At the UW School of Medicine, Research Scientist Dmitry Levin manages a nationally recognized 3D printing lab that has produced more than 100 patient-specific models to guide the decisions of cardiologists and surgeons. In order to carry out their projects, the researchers at the UW lab use the following 3D printers:

  • Dremel FDM printer
  • Formlabs Form2 vat photopolymerization printer
  • UNIZ SLASH pro vat photopolymerization printer
  • NewPro 3D vat photopolymerization Printer
  • Prusa i3 FDM printer
  • Z Corp Zprinter 250 color 3D Printer

By joining with the VA, Levin said that they are merging “all of our collective expertise into a unified effort to offer patients personalized cardiac care based on their unique needs.”

“Now that the FDA has expanded a catheter-based approach to aortic valve replacement (TAVR) availability to patients at low surgical risk, we’ll see more cases that can benefit from 3D printed models for TAVR planning,” Levin added back in August when the institution announced the new partnership. “Beyond improving our understanding of a patient’s anatomy, (3D printing) allows us to know which catheters and replacement valves will fit, and how best to approach the particular structure. That knowledge turns into costs savings for the patient in terms of devices and procedure duration.”

Research scientist Dmitry Levin holds an exact 3D replica of a UW Medicine patient’s heart

Both VA Puget Sound and the UW Medicine were early adopters of 3D printing technology and are seen as leaders in their fields. Developments from this research agreement are expected to not only benefit VA’s 9 million enrolled patients and UW Medicine’s broad geographic patient base but also to reach patients outside of these hospital networks. According to VA Puget Sound, innovations from the collaboration are expected to inform future research, development, and scalability of 3D printing applications to advance treatment approaches to address the complexities of heart disease globally.

Beth Ripley

“VA Puget Sound Health Care System provides comprehensive care to more than 110,000 Veterans enrolled at one of its nine facilities in the Pacific Northwest (two divisions in Seattle and Tacoma; seven Community Based Outpatient Clinics in Bellevue, Bremerton, Chehalis, Federal Way, Mount Vernon, Port Angeles, and North Seattle). As the VA’s fifth-largest research program, VA Puget Sound has research in virtually every major clinical department, including: TBI & multiple blast exposures; memory improvement and Alzheimer’s Disease; PTSD and deployment health; Parkinson’s Disease, diabetes; cancer; substance abuse; lower limb prosthetics; genomics; and Health Services. Additionally, we have seven nationally recognized Centers of Excellence, in areas from limb-loss prevention and prosthetic engineering to primary care education and substance abuse treatment,” Ripley stated.

3D aortic valve with TAVR bioprosthetic

Ripley also reflected about the next frontier for the VA Puget Sound. She believes they will soon be moving into bioprinting, creating living, vascularized bone.

“Currently, when a bone has to be removed due to cancer or chronic infection, it must be replaced with bone taken from another source, often the patient’s own bone. This means a second surgical site and the loss of bone from that site. The goal of printing living, vascularized bone is to provide a means of replacing diseased bone without the morbidity of harvesting it from the patient. Patients with cancers affecting the bone or chronic infections (such as can occur with diabetes) will benefit the most. Success will also lay important groundwork for creation of other living tissues, such as organs.”

Like her colleagues in the VA, Ripley believes that heart disease, diabetes, and cancer are all chronic disease processes that 3D printing is addressing, and in the future, they would like to continue to extend the reach of the technology to address other health concerns. There are 18.2 million veterans in the US that could benefit from the advances in 3D printing, plus all the patients that would indirectly be aided thanks to the advances in research being undertaken. It feels like this is a win-win situation for the patient population of the United States, present and future.

[Images: VA Puget Sound Health Care System and UW Medicine]

The post VA Puget Sound Initiative: Advancing 3D printing for Heart Disease appeared first on 3DPrint.com | The Voice of 3D Printing / Additive Manufacturing.

3D Printing is Leading the Custom-made Evolution to Make Your Things Better Fit You

3D printing is becoming a disruptive technology and will soon be leaving some big names wondering: ‘Why didn’t I think of this first?’. Prototypes and end-use parts made with 3D printing are taking in a chunk out of some of the most profitable industries, such as healthcare, aerospace, fashion and footwear (just to name a few). Especially when a customized fit is a key factor 3D printing is making huge gains. Having conquered the In The Ear hearing aid market in around 36 months, can 3D printing do the same with other product categories? One of the most recent possibilities is eyewear. Fuel3D (a provider of 3D capture and measurement solutions) has just completed the largest ever consumer study into how 3D fitted eyewear is costing opticians and eyewear retailers 26 billion dollars a year.

According to the report Delivering a Fitted Experience in Eyewear, poor fitting eyewear impacts brands and how people shop. The report delves into the importance of fit on buyer experience in the United Kingdom and United States markets and shows that more than one in four adults struggle to find eyewear that fits and as a result more than half (55%) end up leaving eyewear stores empty handed. Also, nearly half of eyewear purchases are returned or have to be adjusted due to poor fit, resulting in further negative financial impacts.

“Buying eyewear should be easy and fun yet people struggle to find the right fit and don’t enjoy the experience. The eyewear industry is treating every face as the same size and shape, resulting in ill-fitting eyewear which is costing retailers, opticians and brands lost customers and sales. It’s time for a more personalised approach.”, suggested George Thaw, CEO of Fuel3D.

Accurate facial analysis to fit the custom made glasses

Despite eyewear’s increasing prominence in fashion, when buying glasses or sunglasses, fit is the most important factor. Out of 4,536 adults in the UK and the US who participated in the study, 44% said they prioritise fit, 33% price and 23% style. And while faced with a bewildering choice of frames, both online and in-store, one in three adults don’t like shopping for eyewear or visiting the optician and one in five don’t like having to try on different frames, highlighting the need to improve the customer experience. Almost 90% of people would happily try something different if they could find the right fit. This is where 3D printing makes a disruptive move. Fuel3D has developed FitsYou, an innovative 3D capture and fitting platform that harnesses the power of AR and AI to empower opticians and retailers to provide a superior personalised service through best-fit recommendations and fully customised eyewear, in-store and online. Through a personal 3D facial scan they can deliver a more accurate and better fitting experience.

An Augmented Reality experience of made-to-fit glasses

“People are crying out for a better fit and a better buying experience. FitsYou delivers perfectly measured 3D fitting, a personalised selection of glasses, guaranteed perfect fit, encourages customer loyalty and gives opticians and retailers a compelling competitive advantage in a retail landscape where the new size is custom.”, said Karl Turley, Chief Marketing Officer of Fuel3D.

The perfect pair: a personalised frame, size, shape and colour

In addition to struggling to find the right fit, the study show that the biggest bugbears when buying eyewear are:

  • Waiting for glasses or sunglasses to be produced -disliked by 64% of adults-.
  • Having to revisit the optician to collect or check the fit -disliked by 59% of adults-.
  • Having to take a prescription to another store -disliked by 58% of adults-.

In every industry where custom manufacturing is needed, 3D printing is becoming more essential. Many startups are growing by making 3D printing technology the core of their business model, defying traditional manufacturing and service providers for the customer-perfect fit. Like Mani.me, a Palo Alto-based startup that uses 3D printing to create ready-to-wear designer manicures taylor made to their customers with 3D scanning. Other companies like, Ministry of Supply, best-known for their alternative approach to solving the most common complaints people have with their clothing, are using 3D printing to engineer their knits with a pattern that takes into account your joints, and other areas that get the most strain on during the day. 

Mani.me makes taylor fit, ready to wear manicures with 3D scanning

Feetz, a company that makes custom 3D printed shoes, one of many trying to reap in profits from the billion dollar athletic footwear market, which according to the last Grand View Research report from last year, size in this industry is expected to reach 95.14 billion dollars by 2025, still, it is hard to tell what percent of that will go to 3D printed shoes. But the sporting industry immersion into 3D printing does not end there, Autodesk and researchers from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are currently collaborating to print football helmets and Royal DSM is 3D printing a mouthguard. That is one of the sporting market products which might just need the most accuracy and perzonalization, to avoid it from falling out or fitting poorly resulting in an injury. Other endeavours include customized golf clubs, lacrosse sticks and tennis rackets. 

Similarly, 3D dental milling technology can deliver products faster than any lab, and with over 500 startups, it is now possible to get an accurate 3D model of the patient’s teeth and 3D dental restoration. A report from SmarTech Publishing expects that revenues in 3D printed dentistry will grow to $3.7 billion by 2021, that’s 10% out of the entire global dental medical technology market.

On another front, the World Health Organization estimates that there are over 30 million people worldwide in need of artificial prosthetic limbs and braces, yet less than 20% have them. This is a crucial area of healthcare where 3D printing has been making mayor headlines. Traditionally, the process of getting a prosthetic limb can take anywhere from weeks to months. But as 3D printers become more affordable, having a prosthetic limb might not be considered a luxury anymore. Many startups are developing bionic prosthesis and exoskeletons and open-source initiatives such as The Enable Community Foundation lets anyone with a 3D printer customize and create a prosthetic hand. So commercially made prosthetics, that could cost well over 5,000 dollars, are down to 50 or even free, thanks to NGO’s. With the 3D printing medical devices market that could be worth U$S 1.88 billion by 2022, it customizable healthcare sounds like a good bet.

2018 was a good year for additive manufacturing. According to the most recent Wohlers Report, in 2017, the industry, consisting of all AM products and services worldwide, grew 21% to $7.336 billion, while a surprising number of large 1 to 5 billion dollar companies (many of which are unfamiliar to most of us) are investing in AM research and development. With this technology being so disruptive, we should see even more ways to incorporate it into the product development and manufacturing operations of most companies aiming to make taylor made products, but according to Wohlers there are still some challenges holding the process back from complete widespread adoption. Limitations such as equipment costs, limited materials, post-processing requirements and lack of expertise or training among workforce employees are retarding 3D printing’s growth.

Actually, according to manufacturing solutions provider Jabil, various industries are embracing 3D printing for fully-functional production parts or customized products and for all other industries exploring opportunities with additive manufacturing, business disruption is inevitable. However, their 2017 3D Printing Trends Report also shows that 96% of manufacturing stakeholders responsible for 3D printing at their organization report facing challenges, like a lack of in-house expertise, high cost of system equipment and of materials. Perhaps, it will take a few more years for the disruption initiative to finally cut through many more industries and their profits, but at this rate, most experts are certain that it will happen eventually.