HDPE Bone Graft Fabrication: Establishing Proprietary HDPE Fabrication Protocol by Selective Laser Sintering

Cranioplasty is one of the surgeries commonly performed to restore the loss of bone and aesthetics in the cranial region. Currently, an autologous bone graft is the preferred source of bone to address cranial defects. However, when the defect size is more than 25 cm2 it poses surgical challenges to reconstruct the defect as the autologous bone stock availability may not be enough to reconstruct, nor does the geometrical shape properly fit the defect. High-density polyethylene (HDPE) has a long history in clinical use for facial and cranioplasty augmentation. It has been applied as a graft for reconstruction purposes with encouraging results. The existing conventional fabrication method does not result in a porous structure in an implant. Selective laser sintering (SLS) is selected as the fabrication medium to selectively fuse particles to create a porous structure because a porous implant is important for graft stabilisation in the human body. However, the knowledge on fabricating HDPE bone grafts using SLS is limited in terms of the temperature sintering window. Furthermore, the known challenges for HDPE fabrication are the narrow temperature sintering window and the raw particle morphology. The aim for this project is to establish a benchmark protocol to fabricate HDPE using the SLS method.