Three-Dimensional Printing and Medical Education: A Narrative Review of the Literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives: Three-dimensional (3D) printing has emerged in the past decade as a promising tool for the world of medicine. The focus of this article is to review how 3D printed models have been used in medical education.Methods: PubMed was the article database used, and the search criteria included the terms 3D printing and education. The exclusion criteria filtered out articles that were older than ten years, were not in English, and did not target a human population. There were 90 discovered articles, and 38 appropriate articles were determined after reviewing titles and abstracts.Results: Three main themes emerged from this review: general medical education, surgical education, and patient education. The more specific findings can be further divided into: using 3D printed models for teaching anatomy and simulation training; and preoperative planning, intraoperative guidance, and postoperative evaluation.Conclusions: The general consensus was that 3D haptic modelling was a useful tool for educating trainees, staff physicians, and patients. The models helped in increasing participants’ understanding of anatomy and pathologies, and improving trainee skill set and confidence. There is much support to continue research in this area and to further develop ways in which 3D printing can help improve medical education. Objectifs : L’impression tridimensionnelle (3D) s’annonce comme un outil prometteur pour le monde de la médecine. Le présent article révisera comment les méthodes d’impression 3D ont été utilisées dans l’éducation médicale.Méthodes : La base de données utilisée pour les articles fut PubMed et les critères de recherche ont inclus les termes impression 3D et éducation. Les critères d’exclusion ont omis des articles qui dataient de plus de dix ans, qui n’étaient pas en anglais, et qui n’avaient pas comme cible la population humaine. Il y a 90 articles qui furent trouvés en tout et 38 de ces articles ont été jugés adéquats pour la révision.Résultats : Trois grands thèmes ont été ressortis lors de cette révision : éducation médicale générale, éducation chirurgicale, et éducation des patients. De façon plus précise, les thèmes spécifiques suivants furent dégagés : l’utilisation d’impression de modèles 3D pour l’enseignement de l’anatomie et la formation par simulation, la préparation préopératoire, le guide intraopératoire, et l’évaluation postopératoire.Conclusion : Les modèles haptiques 3D étaient reconnus comme un outil efficace pour éduquer les stagiaires, les médecins, et les patients. Ces modèles ont aidé à augmenter la compréhension de l’anatomie et de la pathologie des participants et ont augmenté la confiance et les habiletés des stagiaires. Ces preuves démontrent l’importance de continuer la recherche dans ce domaine afin de développer davantage de façons d’optimiser l’éducation médicale à l’aide de l’impression tridimensionnelle.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".