3D Printing Polyetheretherketone Human Implant

Polyether ether ketone (PEEK) resin is a special engineering plastic with excellent performance. Compared with other special engineering plastics, it has many significant advantages. Combustion, peeling resistance, radiation resistance, stable insulation, hydrolysis resistance and easy processing, etc., are used in aerospace, automobile manufacturing, electronic and electrical, medical and food processing fields.

PEEK material is typically used in medical implant surgery of 3D printed PEEK ribs. PEEK has excellent wear resistance, biocompatibility, chemical stability, and Young’s modulus closest to human bone. It is an ideal artificial bone replacement material. Suitable for long-term implantation in the human body. The 3D printing technology based on the principle of fused deposition molding is safe and convenient, does not require the use of lasers, and is simple in post-processing. It is combined with PEEK materials to produce bionic artificial bones. It has the advantages of good compatibility with human tissues, good imaging compatibility, good comfort after implantation, excellent biomechanical properties and perfect anatomical reconstruction. After clinical application tests, after 3D printing the mechanical strength, biocompatibility, toxicity and other indicators of PEEK ribs, no obvious inflammatory reaction was found in the muscle tissue embedded with PEEK material.

Advantages Of 3D Printed Orthopedic Implants With PEEK Material

Combined with medical postoperative case imaging examinations, experts found that 3D printing PEEK ribs has many advantages:

• 1. The elastic modulus and buckling strength of PEEK ribs are very close to real ribs, thus avoiding the effect of stress conduction;
• 2. PEEK ribs are very light;
• 3. PEEK ribs are very tough, which can not only ensure the support strength of the defected chest wall, but also enable the local chest wall to obtain a certain degree of mobility;
• 4. After the operation, we found that the PEEK ribs were not developed in X-ray film and weakly developed in CT, thus avoiding the interference of artifacts in imaging examinations.

3D printing PEEK material processing technology: There are currently two types. One is SLS laser sintering powder 3D printing technology, which has relatively high processing costs. The other is a general-purpose FDM (desktop machine called FFF) fuse extrusion stacking 3D printing technology, which has relatively low processing costs.