
Medere and orthopedics 4.0
March 25 2022
A collaborative effort between Medere, 3DItaly, Formlabs and the orthopedic team at the Clinica Mediterranea in Naples led to the digital reconstruction and 3D printing of a patient's hemipelvis and femur to ensure a successful surgical procedure.
A 56-year-old patient with a history of failed hip replacements: a challenge we faced alongside the orthopedic specialists at the Clinica Mediterranea in Naples.
The Clinica Mediterranea of Naples is a hospital and Diagnostic Center, accredited with the National Health Service, which carries out highly specialized activities, including orthopedic surgery, in which the hip and knee prosthetic orthopedic team operates, composed of Giuseppe Santoro, director of the operating unit, and doctors Francesco Aquino, Massimiliano Amato, Roberto De Filippis and Raffaele Verrazzo.
The team, always attentive to new technologies and interested in finding new solutions, contacted us to collaborate with them for a reconstruction of the patient's hemipelvis and femur through 3D printing of the model.
The basic element for the reconstruction were the images acquired through computed tomography and processed to generate an STL file, necessary to reconstruct the patient's bone anatomy with millimetric accuracy. Thanks to the help of Formlabs Form 3L stereolithographic resin printers, 3D models were then printed for three-dimensional planning of the intervention.
Thanks to the accurate reconstruction and subsequent 3D printing, it was possible to perform a 1:1 scale preoperative simulation of the surgery to be performed, planning all the surgical phases, choosing the instruments and the most suitable prosthetic implant for the case to speed up the execution times and limit intraoperative unforeseen events. From the three-dimensional planning and simulation of the procedure we then moved on to the surgical intervention that was successfully completed.



The success of the experience led Massimiliano Amato, a member of the team of specialists, to declare: “We hope to be able to use this 3D reconstruction procedure more often in the near future, to develop new technologies and new materials together with the teams of dedicated engineers and designers, in order to improve the accuracy of surgical interventions and always provide the most appropriate care to our patients”