Wen Chen Gen.
Recently, a big thing has happened in the field of 3D printing. A team of researchers from Duke University and Harvard Medical School has developed an ultrasound-based sonic ink and 3D printing technology. This kind of sonic ink is very special, it can be flowing, but at the same time, ultrasound can make this sonic ink solidify.
Researchers believe that this technique is very important for minimally invasive surgery and can greatly reduce surgical trauma. What's going on?
We all know that traditional surgery, whether large or small or minimally invasive, inevitably requires a cut in our body, which brings inevitable trauma to our human body. In many cases, this trauma still needs a long recovery period, and often the place where we have surgery is completely healed, and the surgical wound has not yet recovered.
Faced with this situation, the researchers imagined that there was a way to avoid this trauma, preferably without even pulling a hole in the bodyReally, and really developed, by researchers, is this deep penetration acoustic volumetric printing (D**P) technology, which uses a biocompatible "ink" called sonic ink, and then pairs it with the corresponding 3D printing technology.
This ink can be injected outside the body as a liquid, but it can be spontaneously turned into an implant in the body to achieve the final effect. Here's how?
Let's start with traditional 3D printing technology. Conventional 3D printing technology usually builds a final three-dimensional object by stacking up viscous materials layer by layer, or using light to cure a special resin. But this method can not be applied to the human body, perhaps we have heard a lot of 3D printed items, and even a lot of 3D printed medical equipment, 3D printed human tissue, but there is no 3D printing directly realized in the human body, because light cannot penetrate ** and biological tissues.
To overcome this obstacle, a team of researchers from Duke University and Harvard Medical School came up with an innovative way to use ultrasound, coupled with biocompatible bioinks, to 3D print directly where it is needed in the human body.
In this process, when the sonic ink is irradiated by an ultrasonic pulse, it heats up and solidifies rapidly, creating the possibility of injecting the implant into the body in liquid form, which can then be emitted through an external probe to solidify the sonic ink into the desired shape where it is needed, while the remaining sonic ink can be easily removed with a syringe. That is to say, we only need to inject the ink into the body, and then based on ultrasound, the ink in the body becomes solid in a specific position, and finally achieve the best effect we want.
The most special thing about this technology is that it is non-invasive, itThe implant can be 3D printed directly in vivo without the need for traditional open surgeryThis minimizes the trauma of the surgery. Another benefit is that it can be customized according to the needs of the patient, such as printing bones and printing cartilage, blood vessels and other types of implants according to the specific situation of the patient.
So far, the research team has done many experiments on animals, including sealing the incision of the goat's heart, repairing the bone defects of chicken legs, and printing chemotherapy drugs in liver tissue, and the results are also very surprising. For example, if we want to close the incision of the heart of a goat, in the past, if we wanted to close the incision of the heart, we needed to perform thoracotomy surgery, but the new technology can directly inject sonic ink into the heart incision, and then directly fix and shape the heart incision to complete the closure. It directly avoids another opening in the heart, which not only improves the safety of the operation, but also speeds up the recovery of the goat.
If this application can be popularized, many of our next surgeries will become very simple, we only need to inject ink into the human body, and then this ink can repair itself in our body, which directly subverts our minimally invasive medical treatment today, providing patients with a safer and more effective solution.