A comprehensive review on additive manufacturing of medical devices

The trend of growth and aging of population worldwide will pose new challenges in health care, which will require faster solutions addressed to specific pacient needs. In this regard, additive manufacturing (AM) is a group of promising technologies capable of delivering custom biomedical parts of high complexity in reduced lead time. Although it has emerged commercially in the 1980s as a rapid prototyping and modeling technique, it is now applied to production of a wide range of shapes with various possible materials. In this work, the technological aspects of each type of AM process were reviewed according to their advantages, limitations and potential or current applications for the production of medical devices. Direct comparisons of resolution, price and printing speed made possible to identify the most important niche for each AM process in health care sciences. In one hand, the many variables involved make these processes difficult to model and control, but in the other hand, they allow fine tuning of the microstructure to produce purposeful anisotropy, porosity and varying chemical composition, which may be desired in many medical devices. In addition, since the AM technologies have different working principles and feedstock requirements, the historic concept and classification of biomaterials were also assessed in view of their application for tissue engineering, implantable devices and surgery equipment among other uses. The discussion of materials and manufacturing methods was based on several research works and commercial products, which show a extremely fast developing field with a broad range of current and future possibilities in terms of biomedical applications.