Inspiration
In 2024, I interned at a quickly growing branch of the University of Minnesota's interventional radiology program: 3D printing for surgical planning. Well-funded hospitals have access to very expensive and precise printers, where they print out a patient's pathological anatomy to surgically plan around it. My boss introduced me to a cardiologist who wanted a series of aortic variations to teach his residents. He could not otherwise get his hands on these. My boss gave me CT scans, which I had to slice and print myself. This does not need to be the case, and medical education should not be locked behind 3D printing software. I wanted to build something where that cardiologist could get his models without needing to wait.
What it does
TactileLab is a library of 3D printable anatomical features, including pathologies and pre/post-operation parts. I spoke with a doctor and asked him specifically what features he would look for if this was made available for him, and then focused on those. The models can be customized in color, disassembly, and size. Additionally, students can view the models on their phones by scanning a QR code. Anatomical features that were previously not accessible in 3D models are now accessible and can be printed on a desktop 3D printer.
How we built it
I used a combination of Perplexity, Claude, and ChatGPT to build the site and models.
Challenges we ran into
AI is not as good as I wanted it to be at 3D design quite yet, so it took a lot of prodding to get the models to turn out half decent. Additionally, working by myself put a lot of work on just me. It was difficult to get to done on this by myself, especially because I would have preferred to have a secondary input on design choices.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
The extensive library, quality of the models, and being able to finish this huge task.
What we learned
Perplexity Computer is very powerful. 3D modeling on AI is not great quite yet. Due to the difficulty accessing these 3D models, they are also difficult to recreate using AI.
What's next for TactileLab
If it is received well, I would like to hand it off to a pre-med student or a professor who wants to continue the work, contingent that they will not take any profit from it. I will remain adamant that TactileLab is for the betterment of humanity, and its social impact would be far more rewarding than any monetary value that could be collected.
Built With
- chatgpt
- claude
- perplexity
