Application of 3D Printing Technology in Hepato-Biliary-Pancreatic Surgery

Although 3D printing was already proposed in the nineteenth century to produce topographic maps layer by layer, the first real attempts to generate objects that way were made in the 1980s. Swainson of Denmark proposed a process to directly fabricate a product by selective 3D polymerization of a photosensitive polymer (Swainson 1977). In 1979, Nakagawa of Tokyo University reported the use of lamination techniques to produce actual tools (Nakagawa et al. 1979). In 1981, Hideo Kodama of the Nagoya Municipal Industrial Research Institute (Nagoya, Japan) first proposed the protocol of a functional photopolymer rapid prototyping system (Kodama 1981). The United States and Japan pioneered the practical development of real 3D printing technology. In 1986, Charles Hull founded 3D Systems, Inc., and this company developed the stereolithography (STL) file format; in 1988, 3D Systems introduced the world’s first commercial 3D printing system, the SLA-250 (Ventola 2014). It was in the year 1988 that Scott Crump invented and patented a new 3D printing method called Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM); Crump went on to found Stratasys, Inc., and this company developed the first FDM 3D printer in 1992 (Bagaria et al. 2018).