3D Topological Scanning and Multi-material Additive Manufacturing for Facial Prosthesis Development

Prosthetic-based rehabilitation is an alternative to and offers several advantages over surgical intervention. Prosthetic devices are commonly handmade, requiring significant amounts of skilled labour and subjective manufacturing techniques. This chapter discusses the use of industrial optical scanning methods to capture the surface topology from a volunteer’s facial anatomy. This data was then used to generate a 3D CAD model, which was further used to design a patient-specific prosthesis. Amongst the many advantages over the existing techniques are that data collection is non-intrusive, quick to collect and provides anatomically precise information. The use of 3D CAD models provides greater flexibility when developing and evaluating design iterations and further allows for the creation of ‘part libraries’ for use where patients have no initial reference anatomy. Such patient data can also be kept on record should it be required for future use. The final prosthesis is realised through high-resolution, multi-material additive manufacturing, providing precise model reproduction and adding functionality such as mimicry of soft and hard tissues. This approach provides an optimised, low-cost method for streamlining similar prosthesis production.