Sketchfab saves a life

Equanim

This made me smile, a hospital's 3D printer was down so they used Sketchfab and Google Cardboard to visualize scan data of a baby's defective heart, giving doctors a good idea of what they would be dealing with before performing surgery.

http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/google-cardboard-lifesaver-baby-teegan-lexcen-article-1.2489426

pior

Well at least now the hospital staff understands that loading up the 3d file right away is prooooooobably faster than waiting for a printer to print a model over over a span of hours !

... Or am I missing something ?

Maybe they don't even have computers and/or laptops able to load a 3d model, even though they rely on 3d printers which require model preparation in a 3d software in the first place. Sure enough, the fact that Cardboard allows for stereo images is not what made it useful here, as rotating a 3D model on a 2D display gives all the important information. If a hospital performing heart surgeries cannot budget for a computer able to load up 3d scan data then there's a huge issue here that the article is not mentioning.

I am glad that it all went well in the end anyways - whatever actually happened

m4dcow

Google cardboard is $20?

Nice story, but waiting for 3d prints of organs sounds pretty stupid. Hospitals have beefy machines to deal with medical imaging, they should be able to load up a 3d model for sure. They should probably have some sort of VR headset to look at this stuff, and even use some of the other scan data to visualize other useful things than just the physical dimensions.

AtticusMars

I am not a surgeon but I am guessing that if you're doing surgery then being able to hold the thing and get an accurate idea of its size compared to your hands is probably helpful, given that's how you'll be working with it. Maybe even better if you can use it to cast a silicone copy or something that you can sort of practice the surgery with. Not all surgeries are urgent and if there is time to print a 3D model I can't see why it would hurt to have it, invasive surgery is extremely risky and 3D printing is extremely cheap.

I'm pretty sure doctors have been using 3D visualization for years, if not the last decade though so probably the only newsworthy thing about this is the application of VR.

Jonas Ronnegard

printing of organ scans has been common for a long time, and often to practice cutting as said above.

pior

I am not saying that 3d printing of organs is not useful - all I am trying to say that if the doctors were in an emergency situation, but still were hoping to 3d print the organ and had no backup plan for visualization if the (lengthy) printing fails, then there is a big organisation problem in that department.

alban

For those interested, here is the type of files they are talking about:
model

AtticusMars

Was mostly replying to M4DCOW, who said waiting for 3D prints was stupid. Though maybe he meant the same and just didn't clarify it.

I am dead certain that probably most if not all surgeons use 3D visualization in addition to prints (when time permits) to prepare for difficult surgery. This article is blatantly clickbait, and saying "$20 toy saves a childs life in complicated surgery" is a lot more noteworthy than "Standard 3D visualization used for years helps surgeon prepare for complicated surgery"

m4dcow

AtticusMars said:

Was mostly replying to M4DCOW, who said waiting for 3D prints was stupid. Though maybe he meant the same and just didn't clarify it.

I am dead certain that probably most if not all surgeons use 3D visualization in addition to prints (when time permits) to prepare for difficult surgery. This article is blatantly clickbait, and saying "$20 toy saves a childs life in complicated surgery" is a lot more noteworthy than "Standard 3D visualization used for years helps surgeon prepare for complicated surgery"

I mean't it was stupid in these sorts of situations, certainly printing out models if organs to operate on has it's uses, but in this case even if the printer was working why wait (granted I don't know how long printing takes).

Having a physical model is also less needed since many surgeries are performed through the view of endoscopes these days.

pior

granted I don't know how long printing takes

In short : it takes forver On something like a Makerbot (ie : consumer grade printer using a filament), printing something like a tiny bust is pretty much an overnight job. And you also have to prepare the file for printing  : generating the toolpath, adding the supports structures where needed, splitting the model into chunks if the formis complex, and so on. Of course most of it can be automated, but it requires a lot of time and skill still.

Unless I am missing something, if the surgery was an emergency then waiting for hours for a 3d print to be done seems completely wasteful when the model can be loaded up instantly on pretty much any computer or recent phone.

So indeed, whoever wrote the article probably completely misunderstood what happened. My guess would be that they probably knew that they had no time for printing, and therefore were visualizing the organ in regular 3d like one would expect. And then some guy loaded up the model on his phone and displayed it through Cardboard, which is indeed pretty cool but probably not what allowed the surgery to happen in the first place.

OR

The surgery department of that hospital has no computer able to load a mere 3d file, and/or none of the staff has any knowledge on how to do so. If that's the case, that's mindbogglingly worrying and the patient got extremely lucky that one guy saved the day with his phone. I just cannot bring myself to believe that this is the case though.