Additively Manufactured Customized Implant for Severe Acetabular Bone Defect – A Case Report

The advent of metal-based Additive Manufacturing (AM) processes opened new perspectives in improving the treatment of acetabular bone defects by using patient-tailored implants. These implants have the advantage of better complying with severe and difficult cases as AM technology can produce topologically optimized geometries with complex-shaped supports for fixation, ingrowth surfaces and on-demand sizes, more easily than when using conventional manufacturing technologies. This paper reports a clinical case where such an implant was successfully used for the pelvis reconstruction of a male patient who had undergone a long series of revision surgeries at his left hip, following a car accident. The patient computer tomography (CT) data was used not only for designing the implant, but also in the preoperative planning stage for more clearly identifying the positions of the broken screws from a previous implant and investigating the quality of the bone for the new implant fixation. Moreover, 3D reconstructed pelvis models based on two series of CT scans at one-year difference (delay caused by covid-19 pandemic) were compared for evaluating if acetabular defect changes occurred from the time of the AM implant production to the time of the surgery.