3D Printing in Healthcare Simulation. Challenges in a university simulation center

Healthcare simulation is a learning method that recreates real-life healthcare situations in a secure environment. Healthcare professionals can thus train or update their knowledge of techniques and procedures in their medical specialties. Like flight simulation for aircraft pilots, part of the aim of medical simulation is to enable learning by repeating technical gestures and procedures in an immersive medical environment. This virtual or physical, or even augmented, environment is based on equipment that mimics the patient's behavior and physiology, and avoids any risk of injury. In recent years, healthcare simulation centers have been developed and set up in academic environments to provide teaching tools for the initial and continuing training of healthcare professionals.

The widespread adoption of this teaching method has led to a rapid expansion of the market for synthetic simulators, with demand diversifying from procedural models for learning the rudiments of medical diagnosis to simulators designed to teach gestural skills for cardiac surgery. However, the pedagogical needs arising from the clinical situations to be implemented are rarely met by current products. In this context, the need for high-fidelity haptic simulators is particularly acute in surgery. Surgical simulation on synthetic models is set to take over from the human or animal model, where ethical and economic considerations are key constraints. Nevertheless, the haptic sensations transmitted by biological simulators remain the standard.

Future challenges for simulation in the healthcare sector will therefore involve the development of synthetic simulators capable of providing realistic anatomical and haptic rendering of surgical gestures. At the same time, the cost of simulators, as well as their maintenance and updating, is a fast-growing expense for simulation center managers, limiting the spread and generalization of medical simulation in initial training curricula.

On these clinical, pedagogical and economic foundations, Industry 4.0 technologies such as 3D printing, based on product customization and on-demand manufacturing, are emerging as a relevant alternative in the search for solutions to the pedagogical problems of medical training. These technologies offer a means of developing personalized equipment that simulates healthy or pathological tissue more faithfully, and can be integrated into simulators or simulation environments. The aim of this article is to present the concept and challenges of simulation in healthcare, based on the experience of the iLumens university simulation center.