Home-AMA: Healthcare: When the Simulator Becomes the Teacher: How 3D Printing Is Redefining Surgical Training
3D Printing for Healthcareis the topic of our next event,AMA: Healthcare 2026on June 4th.
A French collaborative team presented the case for 3D printed surgical simulators at AMA: Healthcare 2025, walking attendees through the development of Otosurg, a multi-material ear surgery training model that combines clinical realism, anatomical customization, and validated competency assessment.
The project brings together Mael Duportal, Additive Manufacturing and CAD Engineer,M3DPrint, Juliette Prebot, Lead R&D Engineer,PRIM3D at AP-HP(Greater Paris University Hospitals), and ENT Consultant François from AP-HP and Professor atUniversité Paris Cité, and sits at the intersection of a pressing clinical problem: how do you train surgeons on procedures they have never performed, without putting patients at risk?
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The Problem With How Surgeons Learn
Duportal explained that the phrase “never the first time on a patient” sounds straightforward until you examine it closely.
“There are multiple first times,” Simon noted, a point that reframes the entire premise of surgical simulation. Training is not a single threshold to cross but a continuous series of firsts: the first time performing a procedure, the first time without a mentor present, the first time encountering a complication. “I think all these solutions, simulators, have their role at many different steps,” he added.
The conventional tools available to surgical educators each carry limitations. Human cadavers raise ethical constraints that vary by country. In France, for instance, regulations restrict how body parts can be used and they cannot replicate pathology. Animal models offer live tissue but anatomically diverge from human patients and face growing regulatory and ethical scrutiny. Virtual reality can deliver repeatable procedural exposure but lacks credible tactile feedback, and its fixed parameters make it most useful for beginners.
Catalog simulators produced by large manufacturers share the same limitation, useful at the entry level, but closed ecosystems that cannot adapt to specific diseases or individual learning needs.
Source: 3D Printing Industry
