3D Printing Anatomical Models: 5 Questions with Brent Chanin of Mediprint

1) Can You Tell Us a Bit More About What Mediprint Do?

We are a full-service company that can provide any service required to get from medical imaging data to a 3D printed model. We do this by offering a range of services beginning with 3D reconstruction services, image segmentation going slice by slice, and recreating the anatomy that would be important for your surgeons or whoever the end user of your models would be.

2) How Do You Help Customers Get the Best Models?

Everything we do we are very dedicated to the quality, the accuracy and repeatability of what we do, so we have a robust quality assurance system in place. If you’re doing your manufacturing on your own, we can help you remotely manage your equipment and operate your machinery. We have proprietary technology to help us do that and help keep track of everything for you. Finally, if you’re just starting out or you’re in the early stage of developing your program, we can help you do that.

3) How Does Simpleware Software Fit into Your Workflows?

Simpleware really produces great STLs. I think it’s really superior to anything else we’ve found out there. We’ve done a good amount of testing… Simpleware, I’d say by far, produces the highest-quality STLs we’ve found in any software, where all the tools are very similar. With Simpleware, the export of the STLs and the quality of the meshes – they’re always watertight - they’re always really accurate. If you take your models and load them back against the data, you’ll see that it’s perfect’

4) What Kinds of Clinical and Engineering Challenges Do You Help With?

With image segmentation it’s important who you have doing it: we use radiological technologists that are certified, trained and registered in 3D reconstruction. We have radiologists review internally, and we also always request that if we’re doing your segmentation, that your own radiologists and surgeons are reviewing our work.

For the meshes, this is again where Simpleware really stands out. With the export of the STLs, we’ve done a lot of testing, from open-source packages which really shouldn’t be used outside of a clinical setting but we’ve used for testing, up to really high-priced common industry software that you’d find in a hospital. Compared to these, Simpleware models are truly exceptional for their quality, their watertightness… they really are just great.

5) Can You Give Us an Idea of the Turnaround Time from Receiving the First Request or Images Through to Shipping and Receiving the Parts?

Sure, so turnaround time really depends on a number of factors. The most concrete factor is the size of the model: the manufacturing portion for small models can be just a couple of hours, and for something larger can be a few days. Generally speaking, once we get the data, turnaround depends on the different sections you want.

A small part of the anatomy that’s relatively easy to see in the scan, that’s fairly common anatomy, we can be do that typically in under an hour. Engineering is streamlined very well, so less than a day, and then you’re into manufacturing. If we receive your data before noon, we could typically have that in the box the same day.

Something larger, we’re going to be looking at two weeks to get that to you. The image segmentation is more complex which means the quality assurance is going to be a bit more detailed, and manufacturing is probably going to take three days, and then cleaning post-processing the models is going to take two-three days. We can rush orders if it’s an emergency… we’ve turned things around in 24 hours when we’ve had to.

Brent Chanin, CEO & CTO (Mediprint)

Learn More

Thanks to Brent for explaining what Mediprint do in the 3D medical printing field. If you want to hear more, you can view our webinar with Mediprint and Stratasys on-demand.