Hello, everyone. I'm Dr. Seunghak Lee from Asan Medical Center in South Korea, Department of Rehabilitation Medicine. I'd like to show you two cases of finger amputation who have simple body-powered 3D printed processes. Finger amputation is the most common limb amputation in Korea. I think the situation in other countries might be similar. As we know, 3D printing is pretty much popular technology in various fields of medicine. One of them is orthosis and prosthesis. 3D printing has several advantages such as low cost, easy accessibility, easy to individualization, failure is not a burden, I think, etc. Finger amputation is one of the best indications for medical 3D printing, I think. So our rehabilitation team has applied this technology for some patients and I'd like to share our experience with you. Actually, the source code is opened in Enable website. You can get it anytime freely. The mechanism is quite simple. A saved MCP joint flexion force is used to make DIP motion of prosthesis using a sort of linkage system. An elastic string is used connected to a bar. The bar is holded at wrist using a strap. If a patient flexes his MCP joint, prosthesis DIP also flexes through linkage system. So the motion of prosthesis is more physiologic than amputation stump or cosmetic finger amputation. In fact, in order to make it better, a bit of experience and production skills are needed. The first patient was a young female, had a bland injury from food factory. She lost three fingers. The ring finger was replanted. However, index and middle were not. The sufficient range of motion of remained MCP joint and a stump pain control were very important things for successful prosthesis adaptation. Anyway, after that, we applied the prosthesis and provided three months of intensive prosthesis training. And she was very satisfied with the prosthesis. You can see the details of clinical things and functional evaluation results in table one and poster. The second patient was similar. He had left index finger amputation, but it was almost DIP disarticulation, so we had to modify the dimension of the prosthesis. He was also very satisfied and details were in the poster table. One disadvantage of this prosthesis is weak durability. It is easily broken because of the material. I think it is not a big problem because we can make it again quickly. The specification and the dimension of prosthesis was saved in the computer, so we can make it again anytime. These patients also had several rebuilt of the prosthesis. In conclusion, body-powered 3D printed finger amputation is quite good option for the patients and I can recommend it to you. If you want to know anything about it, please email me. Thank you very much.

Dr. Seunghak Lee

Asan Medical Center

South Korea

body-powered 3D printed prosthetics

finger amputations