Iran Inaugurates Production Line of Spine Implants for Children
“This type of implant is used for people who suffer from scoliosis since birth, to place the spine in its correct shape; also, if the vertebrae of the spine are fractured or deformed, the implant is fixed inside the vertebrae of the spine and transmits force uniformly from top to bottom through the rod that supports it,” said Mohammad Hossein Alayee, the managing director of the knowledge-based firm which produces the implants.
“We succeeded in indigenizing the spinal implants with the knowledge of Iranian researchers and specific to the physics of Iranian people,” he added.
Noting that the mechanical tests have confirmed the high quality of the produced implants, Alayee said that its quality is equal to American samples and much higher than the quality of Korean and European samples.
“Meantime, the price of this product is almost one fifth of the foreign (American) sample while enjoying the same quality,” he underlined.
In a relevant development in December, a group of researchers from Sharif University of Technology had also succeeded in developing a platform for designing and manufacturing customized titanium implants to replace bone.
“The remarkable thing about custom implant production is that each product is designed and manufactured specifically and based on the specifications of any patient, and therefore it is different from other products,” said Farzam Farahmand, a faculty member of the Mechanical Engineering Department of Sharif University of Technology.
He added that unlike the common mode of industrial production in which the product is standardized, in customized production, the product cannot be standardized, but the production process chain must be standardized.
“In this project, all stages of designing, manufacturing and finishing operations of customized titanium implants have been studied, modeled, analyzed and tested,” Farahmand said, adding that the production process chain includes conceptual and detailed design, manufacturing based on the SLM method, completion of surface and thermal operations and final processing like washing and sterilization, and all these stages have been optimized, standardized and documented.
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