Safer 3D-printed personalised orthopaedic implants

Editor:

Peter Vee Sin Lee: University of Melbourne, Australia

Submission Status: Open | Submission Deadline: 30 April 2024

Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery and Research is calling for submissions to our collection on Safer 3D-printed personalised orthopaedic implants. Advances in computer-aided engineering, patient-specific computer models, and additive manufacturing or 3D-Printing have transformed patients' treatment through personalised solutions. This collection of articles in the Journal of Orthopaedic Research and Surgery aims to address the three highlighted challenges in safer 3D-printed personalised orthopaedic implants. The call is open to scientific papers addressing optimal implant performance and longevity that can be tailored to individual patients and screening out devices with unacceptable safety risks to the patient.

Image: 3D-printed plate design for pelvic acetabular fractures (Credit: Dale Robinson)

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About the collection

Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery and Research is calling for submissions to our collection on Safer 3D-printed personalised orthopaedic implants. Advances in computer-aided engineering, patient-specific computer models, and additive manufacturing or 3D-Printing have transformed patients' treatment through personalised solutions. Manufacturers and hospitals regularly provide patients with custom 3D-printed orthopaedics and maxillofacial implants. However, there are significant challenges to facilitating personalised medical implant commercialisation and widespread use. Firstly, regulatory frameworks for personalised implants are in their early stages. Current standards for testing off-the-shelf devices are not directly transferrable to devices designed for individual patients. Instead, future test standards could be based on patient anatomy, physiological loadings, tissue properties and even lifestyle information. Secondly, no well-defined framework or methodology supports using and increasing personalised implants' success rate. The fabrication of the implant is only the first step. Successful implantation and treatment require a comprehensive approach, including optimising individual patient pre-operative planning and surgical instruments. Thirdly, there is a significant barrier to manufacture at scale. The additive manufacturing industry for personalised medical implants is fragmented and in the early stages of adopting personalised technologies such as pre-clinical testing, virtual surgery and virtual clinical trials.

This collection of articles in the Journal of Orthopaedic Research and Surgery aims to address the three highlighted challenges in safer 3D-printed personalised orthopaedic implants. The call is open to scientific papers addressing optimal implant performance and longevity that can be tailored to individual patients and screening out devices with unacceptable safety risks to the patient. Suggestions could include,

• Clinical investigation

• Bone-implant interface

• Technologies for the design and development of implants

• Technologies for optimising implants materials, topology, and manufacturing

• Biomechanical investigation, including virtual clinical trials

There are currently no articles in this collection.

Submission Guidelines

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This Collection welcomes submission of Research Articles, Data Notes, Case Reports, Study Protocols, and Database Articles. Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure you have read our submission guidelines. Articles for this Collection should be submitted via our submission system, Snapp. During the submission process you will be asked whether you are submitting to a Collection, please select "Safer 3D-printed personalised orthopaedic implants" from the dropdown menu.

Articles will undergo the journal’s standard peer-review process and are subject to all of the journal’s standard policies. Articles will be added to the collection as they are published.

The Editor has no competing interests with the submissions which he will handle through the peer review process. The peer review of any submissions for which the Editor has competing interests is handled by another Editorial Board Member who has no competing interests.