Printing bones

Just in case you need a spare. [Link]

New Scientist reports on a 3D bone printer.

Exact replicas of a man's thumb bones have been made for the first time using a 3D printer. The breakthrough paves the way for surgeons to replace damaged or diseased bones with identical copies built from the patients' own cells.

"In theory, you could do any bone," says Christian Weinand of the Insel Hospital in Berne, Switzerland, head of the team that copied his thumb bones. "Now I can put spares in my pocket if I want," he says.

Firstly, you need a 3D image of the bone you want to copy. If the bone has been lost or destroyed, you can make a mirror image of its surviving twin.

This image is then fed into a 3D inkjet printer, which deposits thin layers of a pre-selected material on top of one another until a 3D object materialises.