14 DAY TRIAL // Surgery and other branches of health care are already well serviced by 3D printing technology, even though additive manufacturing only took off about two or three years back. Among other things, steps are being taken for the next paradigm shift in treating skin condition and injuries.
You might be familiar with the idea of 3D printing pens, right? Where you use a pen to build objects from plastic filament or light-sensitive ink of some sort.
What a team of students from Brunel University in Uxbridge invented is a device that can do something similar but with a person's skin instead of synthetic substances.
They were tasked with envisioning an item that could be used in a time when technology was advanced enough that life was easy, healthier, longer and more efficient.
A device called the “Suture” was the result. The name originates from the verb “to suture,” which means close a cut or wound by use of stitches.
The irony of the Suture
The “Suture” is a device that can mend skin lesions, and yet it does it in a way that goes totally against the meaning of the word “suture” itself. Mostly because it doesn't actually use stitches at all.
Instead, the device – really a concept for the year 2030 – can totally remove the need for medical stitches by mending wounds on the spot, even preventing scarring.
The Suture would use high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU) to fuse damaged skin back together, until no scarred tissue is left.
Andrew Guscott, the leader of the project, believes that HIFU will be the basis for bloodless surgery without the need for scalpels and anything else so invasive.
HIFU can even heat blood and tissue to a very high temperature, but only a very small portion of the selected tissue, like the size of a grain of rice, hence the ability to fuse skin back together without affecting anything else.
How this qualifies as 3D printing
It actually doesn't, but the students that envisioned it did use a 3D printer to create the tangible model. Besides, while the Suture only uses HIFU to affect tissue that is already there, it's not too hard to imagine future iterations of the concept being equipped with small supplies of stem cells or other such things, maybe even the ability to create skin grafts on the spot.
So it's a 3D printing device that might become a sort of 3D printer itself in the future, hence our allusion to smart pens at the beginning.
