Stratasys announced general availability of a curious new material called “RadioMatrix”.
It’s a resin that’s used in their PolyJet systems, which are capable of producing full gradient multimaterial objects in high detail. While the technology can reproduce Pantone colors by mixing CYMK colors during print jobs, it can also introduce other properties, such as rigidity, flexibility, transparency and more.
RadioMatrix provides yet another dimension to PolyJet 3D printing by adding the ability to control radio opacity. In other words, radio waves can be selectively blocked in an object, and also to varying degrees, voxel by voxel.
Why would you need this capability? The target application is surgical models. Stratasys’ tech can already 3D print highly realistic surgical models that not only involve accurate colors, but also textures — models can have hard and soft parts, just like real tissue.
The addition of RadioMatrix creates the opportunity for another use case: X-Ray and CT scans of printed models.
Here’s the idea: medical scans take a look inside the body by transmitting radio waves. Sometimes the waves are blocked, forming patterns on the sensors from which the internal structure can be interpreted.
A RadioMatrix-enabled surgical model could not only be visually and tactically examined, but now it can also be medically scanned. The results would be very similar to 3D scanning an actual human tissue sample.
Stratasys has gradually improved the capabilities of their 3D printed surgical models using PolyJet technology, and today we find that the models are incredibly realistic, no matter how you’re examining them.
I’m not sure what the next step for improving these surgical models could be. They are now extremely realistic by almost any way you’d want to examine them. They’re just not alive.
At least, not yet.
Via Stratasys
