Oncologists at the Mary Bird Perkins-Our Lady of the Lake Cancer Center and LSU researchers have begun using 3-D printers to create realistic mannequins, or phantoms, of patients undergoing radiation to better target cancerous tumors inside the body.
The models help doctors decide how to best approach the radiation therapy by giving them a clearer idea of the best angles of attack.
“If you’re doing sharpshooting, you need to have an accurate target nailed up on the tree to do your target shooting,” says Dr. Wayne Newhauser, director of the LSU Medical Physics and Health Physics program.
Researchers at the Mayo Clinic have published research on using 3-D printers to create phantoms, but Newhauser says LSU and Mary Bird Perkins are among the first, if not the first, to actually create a phantom using a 3-D printer.
Radiation causes cancerous cells to deteriorate over time, but it also damages surrounding healthy tissue, which doctors must take into account when devising strategies to attack a tumor.
For example, if a patient has a tumor in the pelvis, doctors will develop a complex treatment system to attack the tumor from different angles. Doctors, using phantoms in place of the patients, will shoot radiation into the body at different angles to see how the radiation affects surrounding healthy cells. Radiation instruments measure the amount of excess radiation that would have damaged the healthy cells.
“The idea there is you get more effect on the tumor and less effect on the healthy tissues,” Newhauser says.
The impetus for using the new technology to create the phantoms is twofold. First, the hospital can buy one-size-fits-all models, but the human body rarely fits into the one-size-fits-all category. Second, the phantoms can be very expensive.
“You quickly realize that these standard phantoms, they’re really different from most patients,” Newhauser says.
Newhauser and other researchers first broached the subject of printing their own phantoms while conducting a research study on ways to eliminate tissue necrosis in children battling cancer, according to a news release.
“We need personalized, highly detailed phantoms for this study, and they are just not available anywhere. Instead, we pulled together a small team and printed our own personalized phantoms,” Newhauser says.
The models are created by inputting a plethora of measurements taken from a full-body scan by optical scanning devices from LSU’s Textiles, Apparel and Merchandising program into the 3-D printer. The process has been used only sparingly so far—Newhauser estimates a phantom is created for only one out of every 100 patients—and is not applicable for every patient. But Newhauser says he hopes to increase the scope of the project as 3-D printing technology becomes faster and easier to use, noting it took two years for low-end 3-D printing equipment to make a finely detailed model of a human head.
—Ryan Broussard
