My name is Shirley Anderson, some people call me Andy
This is kinda what he looked like always
This is my husband Shirley Anderson. I'm his wife Della
We've been married too long, according to Shirley, but he's stuck with me now.
It'll be 50 years in September.
Love at first sight, wasn't it? Yes it was.
He was so infatuated.
A lot of good, some bad like in any other marriage, but I think this has been the test.
We met Travis because Shirley was in great need of a prothesis.
He wanted me to tell you that when he had his first surgery and radiation was in 1998
he had a cancerous place on his tongue and they did radiation and a radium implant.
Yeah, they took his chest muscles out to pull them up into his mouth to give him some good tissue
but it didn't work.
It's kind of been one bad thing after another, but it all stemmed from the radiation.
The prosthesis necessary to rehabilitate Shirley is larger than anything we've made here at Indiana University.
In someone's career, in my field, you may never be challenged with a prosthesis of this nature.
Maxillofacial prosthetics requires customized solutions for every patient.
The traditional process for impression, sculpting, mold making and aesthetic characterization
is a laborious task.
I knew there was a need for a digital solution
Travis and his colleagues are the first people in white coats to ever enter this space.
He was like, hey, I have this really cool idea that you guys should get on board with
and we were like, yes, absolutely. Let's do it right now.
I got on the Cintiq and one of the biggest things about the prosthesis is having a feathered-edged margin
where the prosthesis comes in contact with a patient, so there's a tool in ZBrush,
it's a tool in which you could pinch geometry to become very thin and very feathered.
It was half awe and half frustration that they had been doing it the wrong way for so long.
The patient comes in and we scan them and then we take all of that scanned data
we bring it into our software to do our design work.
We print the molds on a 3D printer and then we take those 3D printed molds.
We invest those 3D printed molds with silicone
and then we take those silicone prosthesis and we fit the patient.
With Form 2 printing, we can see the actual pores in the skin and we can see the subtle
wrinkles that Cade has put into his design.
The fit of our molds is so intimate, it's so precise that we can get a perfect feather edge margin.
We've used 3D printing to replace probably about 75 to 80% of the process
in traditional prosthetic fabrication.
You inspired us to develop a team who can help other patients at IU.
That's wonderful, that's what Shirley wants is to help other people.
We started with Shirley Anderson, but we've expanded that workflow to several other patients here.
Jackie was involved in an industrial accident and he lost his left ear
We've taken the ear from the right side, and we've mirrored it in our software, we've flipped
it to the left and we've created a support system for the ear
Being able to provide that digital solution at the second visit in such a short time frame
is unprecedented.
For me, it started off as a unique challenge and something really different that would
be very interesting to be a part of and then it morphed into helping people in a very unique way.
Maxillofacial prosthodontics and the entertainment industry, they don't really get together and
talk to each other about here's how we can benefit each other
So why not, why wouldn't we be able to continue this trend?
10 years down the road, who knows how fast they're going to be able to make something like that.
You're the guinea pig. I know what you're going to write.
It's a privilege to have an opportunity to work with a patient like Shirley
because Shirley makes the process collaborative.
Although it's likely the most significant I will ever face in my prosthetic career
I think it may be the most rewarding
It makes it more worthwhile doesn't it Shirley,going through it if you know that it's going to help somebody else.