The USA’s National Institute of Health or NIH has created an online platform for the exchange of 3D printable biomedical files.
The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, in partnership with the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute for Child Health and Human Development and the National Library of Medicine have created the NIH 3D Print Exchange. It’s a website filled with free, 3D printable models of all of your favorite viruses, proteins and simple lab equipment.
You can design and upload your own printable files to 3D Print Exchange. Of course, not every doctor, scientist or educator knows how to create CAD models of such things, so the NIH is trying to make it as simple as possible. The site will have prewritten scripts that can turn 3D medical data, such as free models from the Electron Microscopy Database, into 3D printable files using the open-source UCSF Chimera software package.
These biomedical models, at the moment, may be great for educating students about a variety of chemical or anatomical structures. Moreover, doctors researching diseases and potential cures can 3D print models to communicate to other researchers about the makeup of a given virus or medicine so that they can understand it at a tangible level. As users expand the catalogue of medical models through 3D scanning, doctors dealing with a medical problem, such as a unique heart deformity, can review the online database for similar cases. And the lab equipment uploaded to the Exchange can be customized to fit the needs of specific labs so that, rather than order expensive components, they can obtain it more quickly and cheaply via 3D printing.
