Methodology of custom design and manufacturing of 3D external breast prostheses

Abstract

Breast cancer is the second most frequent cancer and the most common malignancy in women. In this disease, surgery is one of the strongest therapies to heal it. Among all the surgery treatments, mastectomy with the criteria of radical oncology is an option to bear in mind depending on the patient and clinical indication. For different reasons (age, risk complications, immunologic system) some patients discard the breast reconstruction. Within this group, 90% will use external breast prosthesis to improve their body image and hide the pathology. The existing prosthesis available have different shapes, sizes and are made by different materials (most frequently made by silicon recovered of polyurethane) to maintain a symmetrical shape of the body.

However, some studies have revealed that this prosthesis is susceptible to improvement in terms of weight, esthetic result, and costs. That is the reason why this preliminary work aims to obtain an external breast prosthesis model, softer, more flexible, and with the real areola/nipple form to have a more realistic result made by Advance Manufacture (3D printing). Moreover, this prostheses could be customized by scanning the breast gland before the surgery, or the healthy contralateral breast at any time.