3D printing of anatomical models for surgeons: an investigation on repeatability

part of the trend towards personalised medicine, surgeons are increasingly using 3D printed replicas for preoperative planning. This raises the question of how reliable these models are. This paper examines the repeatability of manufacturing human mandibles. Five polyamide replicas were produced using selective laser sintering and digitised using structured light scanning. Quantitative comparisons were made using Mimics Software. The differences were analysed graphically, using histograms and kernel density estimates. The mean differences ranged between + 0.0274 (SD 0.0671) mm and − 0.0284 (SD 0.0629) mm. The median of absolute differences was 0.0308 mm, i.e. 50