Developing Locally for Developing Countries

Top: 3D Printed Medical Device for Freezing Cervical Lesions Bottom: Pap smears and the treatment for cervical per-cancerous lesions in developing countries is prohibitively expensive, but that all looks to change with the development of CryoPop.

Using new high-resolution 3D printing technology from 3D Systems Corp., engineers from Potomac Photonics, Lanham, MD, helped build prototypes for a medical device created for developing countries.

Working with Baltimore, MD-based Jhpiego, a John’s Hopkins University affiliated non-government organization focused on women’s health, Momo Scientific developed the CryoPop, a low-cost medical device. Aimed at developing countries where pap tests are prohibitively expensive, the simple device uses dry ice for the treatment of cervical pre-cancerous lesions, a concept similar to freezing warts off the skin.

With the easy availability of CO2 cartridges from the soda industry, costs are low. The real beauty of the solution for a developing nation is that properly trained nurses or midwives can detect the lesions and conduct the simple procedure, further reducing health care costs.

CryoPop’s Project Manager, Marton Varady, built his original prototypes using a 3D printer in the Bioengineering Lab at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. However, as the medical device design developed, he needed higher precision. The 3D printer only had tolerances of 0.0010" to 0.0015", and the support material required manual removal.

Mechanical machining was another attempt, but that process could not drill holes deep enough for the design requirement. Instead the part was made in two pieces in order to reduce substrate thickness for the hole drilling.

“Having to glue the parts back together created an entire new set of problems for the design’s robustness, so that was not an optimal solution,” Varady recalls. “Plus, the material resulted in a porous device and it affected how the snow [the actual cryogenic element] from solid CO₂ was forming.”

Hearing about higher resolution 3D printing, Varady found that Potomac Photonics had a 3D Systems Corp. (Rockhill, SC) Projet HD 3000 Plus and solid experience with 3D printing rapid prototyping.

“The resolution of this 3D printer was much higher than what we had in our onsite lab. Working with tolerances in the 0.0010" to 0.0020" range gave us the parameters we needed to fulfill the design requirement. Plus, we could make the entire part in one piece which increased robustness,” Varady enthusiastically comments.

Regarding the company’s use of 3D System’s printer, Potomac Photonics’ President and CEO Mike Adelstein comments, “At the moment some of the best solutions we have seen integrate 3D printing with other micro-manufacturing processes, such as laser or CNC machining. But in this case, the entire design could be fabricated with our 3D Systems Corp. printer.”

As Varady puts it, “3D printing cannot always do everything we need, but it is a great tool and has solved some tough problems in our project. It really helped move us toward saving women’s lives.”

Potomac Photonics
https://www.potomac-laser.com/