3D Printed Synthetic Soft Tissue

Many of the technical skills that have to be trained for life saving interventions require hands on practice on a physical trainer that can then be reviewed by the educators to assess readiness. In many instances those educational encounters result in destroying the area of interest, typically provided as replaceable inserts. áThose inserts are currently produced at centralized facilities, typically the vendors factories. áThese have a limited shelf life and take up considerable space at the training sites. It has been desirable to using additive manufacturing techniques and produce these on site, just-in-time. The University of Washington together with the University of Minnesota collaborated on a research project to deliver a proof of concept to that end that was deemed successful.The current STTR proposal seeks to continue this effort to move it from a proof of concept towards a commercial application to meet the DoD's healthcare training needs.This project will move forward the state of the art in three arms: Perform a requirements and gap analysis to establish the boundary conditions at military training sites to define what additive manufacturing equipment can be deployed, second, develop the data structures and steps required to go from human data, such as MRI and tissue properties data to machine language that can be used by the printers. Finally, the team will develop novel printing inks/materials that will mimic the look, feel and behavior of human tissues to provide realistic training and assessment opportunities.