3D Printed Personalized Corneal Models as a Tool for Improving Patient’s Knowledge of an Asymmetric Disease

Abstract

Additive manufacturing is a vanguard technology that is currently being used in several fields in medicine. This study aims to evaluate the viability in clinical practice of a patient-specific 3D model that helps to improve the strategies of the doctor-patient assistance. Data obtained from a corneal topographer were used to make a virtual 3D model by using CAD software, to later print this model by FDM and get an exact replica of each patient’s cornea in consultation. Used CAD and printing software were open-source, and the printing material was biodegradable and its cost was low. Clinic users gave their feedback by means of a survey about their feelings when perceiving with their senses their own printed cornea. There was 82 surveyed, 73.8% (9.74; SD: 0.45) of them considered that the model had helped them a lot to understand their disease, expressing 100% of them their intention of taking home the printed model. The majority highlighted that this new concept improves both quality and clinical service in consultation. Custom-made individualized printed models allow a new patient-oriented perspective that may improve the communication strategy from the ophthalmologist to the patient, easing patient’s understanding of their asymmetric disease and its later treatment.

Changes in the 3D Corneal Structure and Morphogeometric Properties in Keratoconus after Corneal Collagen Crosslinking

“…Our research group developed a new method to perform a more complete morphogeometric analysis of the cornea on the basis of the data obtained from a Scheimpflug imaging-based tomography system [8]. This advanced corneal analysis has been demonstrated to be useful for characterizing the corneal structure in patients with keratoconus [9,10] for subclinical and clinical keratoconus detection [11][12][13], patient education [14], and even for characterizing the symmetry of the corneal profile between both eyes of healthy patients [15]. The aim of the current study was to conduct this 3D morphogeometric analysis to evaluate corneal changes after CXL in keratoconus patients and during a 6 month follow-up period.…”

“…A custom-made script programmed in the Matlab R2017b (Mathworks, Natick, USA) software was created to transform each point of the cloud provided by the tomographer in polar coordinates into the Cartesian format. This procedure has been meticulously described in several previous research works [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. The program provides a. CSV file containing data of the points of clouds that describe both the anterior and posterior corneal surfaces for the area comprised between the geometric center of the cornea (r = 0 mm) and the mid-peripheral area (r = 4 mm).…”

“…The program provides a. CSV file containing data of the points of clouds that describe both the anterior and posterior corneal surfaces for the area comprised between the geometric center of the cornea (r = 0 mm) and the mid-peripheral area (r = 4 mm). This zone usually contains most corneal anomalies for not only diseased, but also healthy eyes [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15]. Afterward, both surfaces were imported to the Rhinoceros V 5.0 (MCNeel and Associates, Seattle, USA) software, and the "patch" function was used to find the surfaces that better fitted the clouds of points.…”

How to Formulate for Structure and Texture via Medium of Additive Manufacturing-A Review

“…There are several reports on amenable 3D printing technologies for pharmaceutical manufacturing [17,18], which are applicable to different drug development phases (early-phase screening, testing, manufacturing, and dispensing) [19]. Human medicine, as well as veterinary medicine, can benefit from technological advances in 3D printing [20][21][22][23][24]. 3D printing is important to dentistry and can be used to print personalised braces for patients [25,26].…”

Low-Cost Additive Manufacturing Techniques Applied to the Design of Planar Microwave Circuits by Fused Deposition Modeling

“…Additive manufacturing techniques and 3D printers have evolved in recent years as an essential technology that provides different solutions in a wide variety of industries, such as construction, medicine, aerospace, foods and education [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 ]. Three-dimensional (3D) printing is obtaining a significant interest in overcoming the challenges associated with traditional manufacturing processes, such as micromachining, due to its ease of manufacture, low production costs, and minimal waste of materials [ 8 ].…”