Establishing a Medical 3D Printing Lab and Considerations for Ensuring Quality of the 3D Printed Medical Parts

The number and size of 3D printing programs within hospitals are growing. The technical aspects of 3D printing in a hospital or medical center including image segmentation, computer-aided design (CAD), 3D printing, post-processing, and quality control are complex and highly interdisciplinary requiring close collaboration between the radiologist, the ordering clinician, and the engineer. This skill gap necessitates expanding the unmet need for a teaching resource focused on how to set up a well-equipped hospital-based 3D printing laboratory in a healthcare facility (HCF)—or at the point of care (POC)—and ensure best practices for manufacturing high-quality and safe patient-specific anatomic models and guides. The purpose of this chapter is to fill this need, building on the author’s practical experiences to date. We share our experiences building a basic 3D printing laboratory that has now evolved to an intermediate-scale laboratory, equipped with full-color 3D printing. We discuss the goals of our institutional 3D printing laboratory and how that determines the practical steps we follow to ensure the quality and safety of our 3D printed models. Our definitions and explanation of quality inherently necessitate a deep evaluation of the entire medical 3D printing workflow, best practices, and likely failure points. This chapter provides best practices in the form of a primer written by individuals with extensive hands-on experience in hospital-based 3D printing. The material is far from comprehensive; however, we believe that our collective experience and learning conveyed succinctly in this chapter will be useful to medical 3D printing practitioners in beginning- and intermediate-level laboratories.