3D Printer helping cancer patients

“Part of our job as Radiation Therapists is making the equipment that we need to treat patients. Whether that’s something to hold them still, something to place over their body to interact with the radiation, that's part of our job to make those devices. There are commercial products that we use for that but now we've also got the 3D printer which we can make customized devices with as well," Simon said.

“(There’s) no real limit. That's the benefit of the 3D printer… within a very short turn around we can come up with a device to satisfy our staff’s need without looking through a catalogue for purchasing. We can keep trying to print everything, catering for different occasions or different situations," Gordon said.

“The core use of the machine is to make Bolus, which goes over a patient's skin while they're having treatment if they need radiation for skin cancer or superficial disease. The big benefit of this is it's far more accurate than what we can do manually. It's probably more comfortable for patients as well," Simon says.

“We can create more complicated shapes now using this rather than what we did previously. Now we can do complex geometries for the patients pretty easily.

“These days in our industry, it's all about how fast we can get a patient starting their treatment. You know, as they've got cancers that are growing, we want to get them onto treatment as fast as possible. And when we've got something like this, we can make exactly what we need. There are no roadblocks, we just go.”

“We have a lot of avenues that we can explore to use it. There's a lot of opportunities working with our physics team to make anatomically accurate models – that we 3D print for them – to use for testing purposes as well as the possibility of using it to print custom localization for patients, so that’s something to keep them still and comfortable while they have their treatment," Gordon says.

For all the benefits that the 3D printer provides them, Brown and Lu credit the PA Research Foundation for acquiring this technology for the benefit of the PA's patients.

 

“It can be hard to get funding from internal sources for something that's considered on the smaller scale, as far as health budgets go. So, we used some of the PA Research Foundation funding to pay for this, and they very generously bought this and a lot of the other equipment that we need so we can set this project up," Simon explained.

“Thanks to the foundation for giving us the funding for it. It's going to and already has made a huge difference to our lives and to the patients’ lives as well," Gordon said.