How to design and additive manufacture individualized surgical guides for hand osteotomy

The paper focuses on the design and additive manufacturing of patient-specific surgical guides, in particular for hand osteotomy. The use of these guides allows the surgeon to better orient during surgery, improves intervention accuracy, reduces surgery time and cost and decreases X-ray exposure. They can be used for routine activities or for new and complicated surgical procedures. The processes of design and manufacturing these guides involve tight collaboration between surgeon and engineer for correctly transferring medical requirements into technical specification, which can be a difficult task due to professional language barrier, specific constraints, etc. Therefore, starting from the approach used so far in practice, the paper fundaments the need and presents the current status of implementation of an intelligent online platform, as a modern solution to overcome miscommunication problems and to ensure a degree of automation to a workflow which otherwise has to be resumed for each patient/clinical case.