Computer-aided design and manufacturing of surgical templates and their clinical applications: a review

ABSTRACT

Introduction: The surgical template is a guide aimed at directing the implant placement, tumor resection, osteotomy and bone repositioning. Using it, preoperative planning can be transferred to the actual surgical site, and the precision, safety and reliability of the surgery can be improved. However, the actual workflow of the surgical template design and manufacturing is quite complicated before the final clinical application.

Areas covered: The major goal of the paper is to provide a comprehensive reference source of the current and future development of the template design and manufacturing for relevant researchers.

Expert commentary: This paper aims to present a review of the necessary procedures in the template-guided surgery including the image processing, 3D visualization, preoperative planning, surgical guide design and manufacturing. In addition, the template-guided clinical applications for various kinds of surgeries are reviewed, and it demonstrated that the precision of the surgery has been improved compared with the non-guided operations.

KEYWORDS:

• Surgical template
• preoperative planning
• CAD/CAM
• 3D printing
• clinical application

Declaration of interest

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by Natural Science Foundation of China [81171429, 81511130089], Foundation of Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality [14441901002, 15510722200, 16441908400], and SJTU - KU Leuven Fund.