RAPID PROTOTYPING TECHNIQUES FOR ANATOMICAL MODELING IN MEDICINE

The rapid advances in computer technology, often driven by the demands of industry, have created new possibilities in surgery which previous generations of surgeons could only have imagined. Improved imaging wi th computerised tomography (CT) has been followed by magnetic resonanc e imaging (MRI) and, more recently, it has become possible to reformat the data as three-dimensional images. Computer technology has now mov ed forward with the advent of rapid prototyping techniques (RPT) which allow both the production of models of the hard tissues and custom-ma de prostheses from computerised scanning data. In this article we revi ew the development and current technologies available in RPT and the a pplications of this advance in surgery and illustrate this with two ca se reports.