Voxel Printing

3D printing offers many exciting possibilities in medicine with applications in simulation, teaching, surgical planning and personalised orthoses and prostheses. Voxels (volumetric pixels) represent values distributed as blocks on a 3D grid. When 3D printed, these tiny blocks enable a very fine level of control over the properties of the material, down to the level of around 30 microns (about half the width of a human hair).

Pi-A has developed a system for generating voxel prints with full control over the density and material distribution across space. This has a wide range of applications, for creating variable flexibility in medical braces, or very detailed models of imaging data - like the brain MRI shown here.