(Source: Clare Scott – 3dprint.com) Researchers 3D Print Kidney Phantoms to Determine Optimal Radiation Dosage for Patients
With certain diseases, you often hear people say that the treatment is worse than the disease itself, in terms of discomfort and pain. That’s particularly the case with cancer and the nausea caused by chemotherapy, and the side effects caused by radiation, especially in larger doses. Radiation carries its own risks, too, though in many cases it’s the only way to fully eradicate cancer. It’s important, therefore, that doctors are extremely careful in administering the correct dosage of radiation, which can vary from person to person.
It can be difficult to determine the best dosage of radiation for each particular patient, but – say it with me – 3D printing can help! Researchers at the University of Würzburg have been using 3D printing to prototype kidney models, or kidney phantoms, of different shapes and sizes in order to assess how much radiation is needed for optimal imaging. The goal is to be able to develop patient-specific treatment, and kidneys were chosen for prototyping as they’re one of the highest-risk organs in radiation therapy and imaging.
“This research shows a way of producing inexpensive models of patient-specific organs/lesions for providing direct and patient-specific calibration constants,” said Johannes Tran-Gia, Ph.D., corresponding author on the study. “This is particularly important for imaging systems suffering from poor spatial resolution and ill-defined quantification, such as SPECT/CT.” (…)
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Photo © University of Würzburg, as re-published by 3dprint.com (ibid)
