Materialise Partners With Hand Specialist to Treat Pediatric Complex Fractures

Materialise NV, a Belgian 3-D printing company, has produced a set of titanium implants in partnership with hand specialist Frederik Verstreken M.D. to give children with complex, improperly-healed forearm fractures a fresh chance for an active childhood.

One of those children was seven-year-old Joos, who broke both bones in his left forearm on the playground. When the healing process was complete and the cast was removed, it was revealed that Joos had a crooked, improperly healed arm for which the simplest movements had become impossible. This also left him without feeling in his fingers. Although he once avoided the use of his badly-healed arm, Joos can no longer tell which arm he had surgery on without looking for the scar.

Against the advice of their doctor and physiotherapist who told them that there was nothing to be done, Joos’s parents started looking for a way to fix their son’s arm and found Frederik Verstreken M.D., a hand specialist from Monica Hospital, Antwerp, Belgium. Verstreken used 3-D surgical planning solutions and 3-D printed, patient-specific surgical guides from Materialise NV, and 3-D-printed, custom-made titanium implants from Meterialise’s subsidiary Mobelife, to perform an osteotomy and restore full-functionality to the boy’s arm.

The result of the surgery exceeded the parents’ expectations. Soon after the surgery, Joos regained the feeling in his fingers, a sensation he had not felt for the previous 6 months, and could once more enjoy life as an active young child.

“I had a child with a handicap, now he’s a normally functioning boy,” said Kathleen, Joos’ mom.

In the meantime, Verstreken has performed four other similar surgeries on children who lacked full mobility in their forearm after double fractures improperly healed. “These cases were so difficult and complex that it would not have been possible to obtain a successful reconstruction using conventional techniques,” he said.

Pediatric orthopedics is a severely underrepresented field, as bone implants and other orthopedic devices are difficult to make for patients that are still growing. The demand is also not high for pediatric patients, which discourages profit-seeking companies from entering the market. As a manufacturing process, 3-D printing has becoming a great boon to the field, as it can make highly specialized devices and implants at a low cost.