Once in a while the benefits of an engineering effort are so out of the ordinary they deserve more attention than a press release. A case in point: A band of companies have set aside profit motives and shareholder interests to support a small group of Iraqi surgeons who are patching up fellow citizens wounded in terrorist attacks. The companies include Stratasys in Minneapolis, Z-Corp. in Burlington, Mass., 3D Systems in Valencia Calif., and software developer Materilize in Glenn Burnie, Md. The effort will focus on the most serious cases, usually involving head injuries and missing limbs.

The plan, called Rp4baghdad.org, works this way: An MRI or CT scan of a wounded individual gets emailed to a Materialize office. There, engineers use their Mimics software to transform the scanned data into an STL model that shows only the tissue of interest, usually damaged bone. The STL file can then be transformed into a 3D plastic model of the wounded area on a rapid prototyping machine at one of the other companies. Most Iraqi patients have maxillofacial wounds, injuries of the face and jaw in which bones and fragments can be out of place and hidden by soft tissue. It's difficult to repair the damage without a clear picture, and simple 2D X-rays don't show sufficient detail. But with an rapid-prototype (RP) model of the injured facial bone, a surgeon can clearly see the damage, “practice” the surgery in his office, and more accurately select braces and screws to hold bone fragments in their proper place.

Jon Wagner, associate professor of plastic surgery at the University of New Mexico, says this RP practice leads to less time in the operating room and fewer secondary surgeries. Wagner has an RP machine in his office and can be in the OR with an RP model within 24 hrs. of an injury.

The first patient to benefit from the therapy was a 42-year-old man shot several times in the jaw and neck. But things did not quite go as quickly as possible. After he was scanned, it took about 15 days to get an RP model back into surgeons' hands. Not the speediest turnaround.

There were several other problems. The scanner in the Iraqi medical center is rather old, so its minimum 2-mm thickness is not optimal for making models. A 1-mm slice would give more detail of thin bone in regions such as the eyeball orbits and roof of the mouth.

Of course, there have been humanitarian efforts before. For the tsunami relief, Hollywood threw parties, kids across America collected pennies, and the tragedy received hundreds of hours of TV time. But the Iraqi medical story is a bit different. Hollywood and the mainstream media would choke if it had to report anything remotely positive coming out of Iraq, hence stories like this one get little attention.

But that aside, what the Iraqi medical staff needs now is a more up-to-date CT scanner. All contributions, mostly in kind, go directly to the patients and the medical staff in Iraq. The organization requests that if you wish to donate equipment, please contact them at info@rp4baghdad.org.