Car crashes, falls, and sports injuries can all result in fractures to the delicate bones surrounding the eye. A team of Carle Illinois College of Medicine students is engineering a new adjustable 3D-printed guide to help surgeons restore eye movement and prevent long-term facial deformities in patients with trauma to the eye socket. The innovation is designed to improve the placement of special implants used to repair fractures of the lower part of the eye socket.
Eye socket injuries are common and can cause nerve damage that affects both eye function and the appearance of the facial structure. A fracture of the bone at the lower rim of the eye socket – called an orbital floor fracture – accounts for 30-40% of facial fractures. “Repairing the fractured bone and repositioning displaced tissues prevents or corrects double vision, sunken eye, and infraorbital nerve injury that can cause numbness in the cheek or upper lip,” said team co-leader Rand Kittani. “Reconstruction also restores proper orbital volume and shape, preserving both visual function and appearance.”
Surgeons treating patients with these injuries have two options: scan the patient’s facial structure and create a custom-fit titanium plate that is surgically implanted under the eye, or, when the need is urgent, rely on standardized implants that must be sized during surgery to fit the patient. But the current standardized implants can be difficult to place properly.
“With minimal intraoperative landmarks, using standard implants relies solely on the surgeon's clinical judgment, which can introduce variability in implant placement and result in poorer post-surgical outcomes,” said Varun Gopal, who leads the team. “This innovation could be used intraoperatively by surgeons to obtain a dynamic landmark when using standard implants to reduce implant misplacement and improve procedural confidence.”
Using 3D scans and computer-aided design (CAD) technology, the team produced an adjustable 3D-printed prototype of a standard implant that can assist surgeons with proper placement. The new guide is especially valuable when time and resources don’t allow for a custom-fit solution. In initial testing, the 3D-printed solution produced promising, consistent results. Kittani says more testing will help the team evaluate the prototype’s effectiveness in improving implant placement.
The innovation is gaining attention. The team recently presented their innovation and early results at the American College of Surgeons meeting in Chicago. Other collaborators on the project include CI MED students Gyung Seol and Ian Ray, along with three oral maxillofacial surgeons: Drs. David Cartier, Erik Quintana, and Benjamin Schaefer, all of Carle Health.