The example of test prosthesis built by 3D printer

3D printing has been used in medicine since the early 2000s, when the technology was first used to make dental implants. Since then, the use of 3D printing in medicine has expanded significantly: Doctors from around the world describe ways to use 3D printing to produce ears, skeletal parts, airways, jawbone, eye parts, cell cultures, stem cells, blood vessels and vascular networks, tissues and organs, new drug forms, and much more.

Using model files for 3D printing provides an opportunity for sharing work among researchers. Instead of trying to reproduce parameters described in scientific journals, physicians can use and modify off-the-shelf 3D models. To that end, the National Institutes of Health established the 3dprint.nih.gov exchange in 2014 to facilitate the exchange of open-source 3D models for medical and anatomical products, non-standard equipment and mockups of proteins, viruses and bacteria.

Neuroanatomical models printed on a 3D printer can be particularly useful for neurosurgeons, providing insight into the most complex structures in the human body, which in principle cannot be obtained based on two-dimensional images.

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Neuroprosthetics or neural prosthetics is a field of biomedical engineering and neurobiology concerned with the development of neural prostheses and their operation. The system was first used to replace sensory and motor functions. And scientists are exploring different options for delivering signals to the nervous system.

Prosthetics researchers are now trying to provide a prosthesis that will feel objects just as well as a real hand, perhaps even better. After all, such a prosthesis can lift objects weighing up to 20 kg!

After a limb is amputated, the motor nerves that controlled it remain in the body. The remaining nerves can be surgically transferred to a small section of a large muscle (this is called reinnervation). For example, to the large pectoral muscle, if we are talking about an amputated arm. As a result, the person thinks that he or she should move the finger. The brain sends a signal to the part of the pectoral muscle to which the nerve that used to go to the fingers is attached. The signal is picked up by electrodes that send the pulse through wires to a processor inside the robotic arm. This is where electromyography helps. This technology records the difference in electrical potentials that occur when a muscle works. It picks up the movement of the reinnervated part of the pectoral muscle, and the signal is then transmitted to the desired part of the prosthesis, and that part moves.

Targeted sensory reinnervation is carried out in the same way. It is needed so that the person can feel touch, heat or pressure with the prosthesis. The procedure is reversed. The surgeon reattaches the remaining sensory nerve to the skin area on the chest. And the sensors on the prosthesis transmit a signal from touch to this very skin area. And the person experiences tactile sensations.

Neuroprosthetics is a global topic for the future. Technology is becoming a reality thanks to the hard work of scientists. Perhaps in the future scientists will develop cognitive implants, making us smarter and stronger… Will we become a cyber society…?

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