Teenager Regains Ability to Walk Thanks to 3D Printed Hip Implant

Being immobilized to the point where you can only move around in a wheelchair is enough to crush one's spirit, but a 15-year old Swedish girl just got a new lease on life.

She suffered from a congenital disease which caused a neurofibroma, a benign tumor that grows on the peripheral nervous system. The tumor caused extensive damage to her pelvis.

Because of that, and a surgery that suffered complications which resulted in a severe deformation of her left hip, she has been confined to a wheelchair.

Or, rather, was confined to a wheelchair until 18 months ago, when Professor Rydholm of Skane University Hospital in Lund, Sweden, approached Mobelife regarding the case.

Mobelife ("a specialist in implant design and production for challenging bone and joint reconstruction surgery") proceeded to make her a 3D printed custom hip implant. They used a tomography scan to design it, and it was later affixed to the bone through screws, during another operation.

The girl was free of pain almost immediately after the implant (September 2012) and was walking in crutches in a matter of months. Today, she doesn't need even that aid.

It goes to show that 3D printing really does have truly astonishing medical uses. For a technology that is still so very young, it is advancing quickly, and changing the world as it does.

In fact, more than a few health-related inventions have cropped up over the last months, like 3D printed custom insoles, injectable 3D printed electrodes, 3D printed prosthetic legs (for a duck, granted), a 3D printed radiotherapy mask (for cancer patients), etc.