GE Healthcare, VA Seek to Address Veterans’ Medical Needs Through 3D Printing Tech

General Electric’s health care business and the Department of Veterans Affairs have signed a research agreement to accelerate the use of 3D printing technology to help meet the medical needs of military personnel and retirees, 3DPrint reported Thursday.

Under the partnership, GE Healthcare and VA’s Puget Sound Health Care System will help radiologists speed up the development of 3D printed models and prosthetics as well as identification of new imaging techniques using the company’s 3D printing software and AW VolumeShare workstations.

AW VolumeShare 7 is a multimodality workstation designed to review and process up to 5K images in a single dataset using its 64-bit technology.

“Using the AW VolumeShare 7 workstations, VA radiologists specializing in cardiology, oncology, orthopaedics and general radiology can quickly produce and critique models from patient studies as part of their normal clinical tasks,” said Colin Holmes, senior director of additive and visualization at GE Healthcare.

“As these radiologists are full-time practitioners, efficiency improvements with AW will allow them to spend more time focused on patient care, guided by 3D printing outputs, and less time on the labor-intensive process of producing 3D models,” Holmes added.