Researchers at the University of California, Davis, proposed a pathway for 3D printing inside human body. This proposal earned them the David Dornfeld Manufacturing Vision Award in the Society of Manufacturing Engineers’ 2024 National Science Foundation Manufacturing Blue Sky Competition.
The Blue Sky Competition seeks interdisciplinary proposals for radical, outrageous, transformational, or breakthrough ideas. These ideas should pose grand challenges to address through manufacturing research and have the potential for transformative impact.
3D Printing Inside Human Body
In their proposal titled “Printing beyond barriers: A pathway to non-invasive deep inside body printing,” Mohsen Habibi, an assistant professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC Davis, and his UC Davis collaborators, Aijun Wang, a professor of biomedical engineering and surgery, and James Marcin, a professor of paediatrics and vice chair for paediatric clinical research, propose using Direct Sound Printing, or DSP, to 3D print things like implants or scaffolds.
“We could print implants inside the body without open surgery. Another application is the maintenance of regions that are not accessible. Let’s say you’re going to do a repair inside the fuselage [of an aircraft], somewhere that cannot be reached, that we would need to open or destroy it to do the printing or repair.”
– Mohsen Habibi, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, UC Davis
Habibi discovered DSP in 2018. The novel 3D printing method employs sound waves rather than light or heat to form solid material from a polymer solution behind a physical barrier.
The researchers propose using biologically compatible materials to 3D print inside the body, with the ultrasound source being spatially adjusted to print the desired shape.
The project won the top prize over five other finalists chosen from more than 50 submissions.
