A team of surgeons in the UK has used 3D printing to reconstruct one side of a man's face after a traumatic motorcycle accident in which he broke his cheekbone, nose, jaw, and fractured his skull.
Top image: A model of the skull with the printed implants / BBC
Using casts taken from the non-injured side of patient Stephen Power's face, the surgeons were able to successfully create a duplicate version of his bone structure for the other side. Then they printed and implanted the new bone. The results, surgeon Adrian Sugar told the BBC, are "in a different league from anything we've done before."
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They also put together this short documentary (Warning: graphic images) that you can watch, showing just how the process worked:
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