OSF St. Francsis Medical Center

OSF St. Francsis Medical Center

Caterpillar 3D Printing Impacts Healthcare

We use the latest technology to do more than just design and manufacture machines.. See how we partnered with OSF HealthCare to give a patient a fighting chance with a 3D printed liver.

By Edgar Sandoval, Contributor | Posted: September 23, 2021

On an average day, you’ll find our Additive Manufacturing team engineers in our Industrial Design Center busy designing Cat® machines and components. This often involves using their state-of-the-art 3D printer to create parts and assemblies. But every so often, they 3D print human organs.

Yes, you read that right.

These projects are part of a partnership with OSF Innovation and its Jump Trading Simulation & Education Center. The 3D prints give OSF’s surgeons an up-close, detailed view of the organs, prior to surgery. In recent years the team has 3D printed hearts. But this year, they printed a liver for the first time. It was Kevin Asbury’s liver. Kevin had stage 4 colon cancer that had spread to his liver and was given a 20-30% of survival. Watch to learn more about how Caterpillar used the technology to support doctors who were able to save Kevin’s life.

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Accelerating the use of 3D modeling technology in health care

OSF Innovation, through the OSF Innovation Advanced Imaging and Modeling Lab (AIM), advances multi-dimensional imaging and modeling into everyday clinical impact including pre-surgical planning with automated segmenting for virtual and augmented reality.

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Sister M. Pieta Translates 3D image

Sister M. Pieta Translates 3D image

Kevin & Melissa

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Kevin and Melissa Asbury share their story.

Sister M. Pieta

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Engineer Sister M. Pieta translates 3D images of liver.

Dr. Sonia Orcutt

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Dr. Sonia Orcutt explains how the model helped her explain surgery to Kevin.

Eric and Christian

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Eric and Christian use 3D printers to help Cat product developers.

Additive Manufacturing

Caterpillar’s continued focus on additive manufacturing, or 3D printing as it’s more commonly referred to, is to bring the additive manufacturing technology from a prototype solution to a main manufacturing method and to use the technology to keep our customers and factories running optimally.

Sprocket designed for additive manufacturing

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Edgar Sandoval

Contributor

When he’s not creating content to highlight our sponsorship partners, Edgar Sandoval is coaching soccer or telling jokes at comedy clubs around the country. He started here after spending time in Hollywood and working for four network television affiliates. Edgar loves telling stories about the people, products and services that make Caterpillar great!

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