3D print­ing is a rapid­ly advanc­ing tech­nol­o­gy in the field of med­i­cine, how­ev­er, it has not tra­di­tion­al­ly been used in post mortem restoration.

Recog­nis­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties in this area, Lisa Bil­ton, Post Mortem Tech­ni­cian with Foren­sic Med­i­cine Wol­lon­gong, is inves­ti­gat­ing how 3D print­ed mod­els can be used to make arti­fi­cial pros­thet­ics for use in the restora­tion of deceased patients.

Although there are cur­rent­ly sev­er­al restora­tion approach­es in use, few of them involve sta­ble restora­tion of frac­tured cran­io­fa­cial struc­tures as the foun­da­tion for the soft tis­sue reconstruction. 

This new approach will have a par­tic­u­lar focus on the restora­tion of pae­di­atric patients. It will be use­ful in recon­struct­ing the head, face and neck regions of severe­ly injured chil­dren or chil­dren who have had post mortem exam­i­na­tions dur­ing which tis­sue retrieval has tak­en place.

Still in its pilot stage, this study brings togeth­er the exper­tise of the NSW Coro­ner, Foren­sic Med­i­cine social work­ers, radi­ol­o­gists, and physicists.

This project demon­strates the deep respect the Foren­sic Med­i­cine team has for the deceased and their prop­er restora­tion to their pre-injury or pre-autop­sy appear­ance. It aims to gain an under­stand­ing of cur­rent nation­al approach­es to restora­tion and explores the advance­ment of cur­rent tech­niques with the appli­ca­tion of 3D print­ed prosthetics.

The suc­cess of this project will be the devel­op­ment of an effi­cient and robust cran­io­fa­cial restora­tion tech­nique that could become a pro­fes­sion­al stan­dard. We hope this may also have a pos­i­tive impact on fam­i­lies and sup­port their expe­ri­ences dur­ing the griev­ing process.