Application of rapid prototyping and rapid tooling for development of patient-specific craniofacial implant: an investigative study

In today’s competitive world, the life-style of the average human being has become very fast. This causes a huge number traffic accidents resulting in various types of injuries. In India, most of these accidents take place during bike riding and this causes different types of fracture of bones. One of these injuries is head injury. For the proper treatment of such patients, demands for patient-specific craniofacial bio-implants are increasing day by day. This kind of ‘tailored’ implant development through near net shape manufacturing is a highly challenging task since the developmental time and cost has to be as low as possible. At the Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute (CMERI), one such process of implant development was explored taking one case of head injury. The implant was developed through the “3D CAD-rapid prototyping (RP)-rapid tooling (RT)-investment casting (IC)” route. For achieving the task, only the facilities available at CMERI were utilized.