UMHealthSystem / YouTube
If you think 3D printing’s overhyped with all this talk of plastic guns and strange, spider-like houses, you clearly haven’t seen this: a tiny airway splint created using a 3D printer that saved a three-month-old’s life.
Doctors at C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan (coincidentally, where my son was born not 10 months ago) paired their medical know-how with the latest 3D printing technology to generate a custom, synthetic bio-part that ultimately saved a child who’d lost the ability to breathe on his own.