Using Go!SCAN 3D Scanner for the Individualized Orthopetic Development in Medical Technology

The laboratory for additive manufacturing (LaF) at Landshut University, deals with the process of reverse engineering headed by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Norbert Babel. This includes scanning objects, scanning data processing using special software tools and transfer to a CAD system, modeling and simulating, as well as generating prototypes developed which are manufactured with different additive manufacturing processes. This takes place across faculties in research projects, along with student’s project, bachelor and master thesis.

Since there is an increasing demand on patient-specific individualization in medicine, primarily in the field of prosthetics, students on the Biomedical Engineering course were assigned to develop individualized finger splint orthosis.

As a first step, the students scanned a hand with Creaform Go!SCAN 3D scanner for which the orthosis should be developed (fig. 1). Then, data has been treated in VXelements software (fig. 2). This means cleaning up the overlapping image points and removing geometry offsets. The reduced scan file will be stored in STL format for further processing with Rapidform program (fig. 3).