Technological progress is changing which procedures doctors can use and where they can use them. Today, medical device manufacturers realize the patient benefits and opportunities in treating patients in their own home. In addition to more personalized care, patients can also significantly reduce the cost of the treatment they need in the comfort of their own home. Doctors cannot offer all medical procedures at home, but a surprising number of treatments are also possible at home.
Dialysis is one example. Due to the type and frequency of dialysis treatment, patients have to spend a lot of time on this life-saving therapy. To save patients the trouble of travelling to the treatment facility and to reduce the risk of infection, many manufacturers are developing special dialysis machines for home. On chronolife.net, you can find the best utilities of the finest technologies.
Personalized and Individualized Medical Devices
Modern medicine is increasingly focusing on the individual patient and collecting comprehensive data on people and their clinical picture. Based on this data, individualized therapies and medical products are increasingly being developed. The ongoing personalization promises patients an optimally coordinated treatment. At the same time, however, there is increasing pressure on manufacturing companies, which must be ever more flexible with given price pressure. The selection of high-performance manufacturing technologies and process-related data to optimize processes helps to master this challenge and ensure long-term success.
Individualized, Minimally Invasive Medical Instruments
In the medical research project, experts have developed a manufacturing process for minimally invasive single-use products. With this process, highly customizable guide wires can be produced from fibre-reinforced plastic. The high flexibility of the process is due to the selection of high-performance technical methods and benefits from the advantages of networked, adaptive production. The evaluation of all process data using learning data mining algorithms drastically accelerates product development and manufacture.
As a consequence, instruments can also be manufactured economically in very small quantities. This should enable doctors in the future to specify single-use instruments as required and have them produced in small numbers. The individual material combination in the profiles ensures optimal mechanical properties and enables artefact-free use in magnetic resonance tomography.
The 3D Printing In the Medical Application
3D Printing is called an additive manufacturing process, starting three-dimensional objects from a digital model created by the layered application of the material. The first 3D printing techniques were developed back in the 1980s. However, the transfer to the medical field only took place in the past decade.
To create a 3D-printed medical object, an anatomical target area (e.g. heart) is first defined. Using an imaging process (e.g. CT or MRT), image data is generated from the target area, which has to be converted and optimized into a valid format for layered 3D Printing. The resulting digital model shows a three-dimensional, patient-specific, true-to-scale image of the target area.
Depending on the application, plastic, ceramic, metal or synthetic hydrogels can be used as printing materials. In addition to these traditional materials, research is intensified on so-called bio-inks. This “bio-ink” mainly consists of living cells embedded in the hydrogel.
