Twenty years ago, a little girl in India fell off a trolley truck and suffered a traumatic injury. Known as TMJ Ankylosis, the girl’s upper and lower jaw fused together, gradually limiting her ability to open her mouth. She was 5 years-old at the time of the accident. By adulthood, she could open her mouth only a few millimeters, making it extremely difficult to eat, drink, talk, sleep and even breathe. She’d describe it by saying, “My chin was inside me.”
In early 2021, the girl, now a 26-year-old woman, got a new lease on life thanks to LUCID Implants and a team of surgeons in the Indian city of Nagpur. In a landmark, 6-hour surgery, Dr. Nitin Bhola, head of the Oral and Maxillofacial Department at Datta Meghe Institute Medical Sciences, and his team surgically released the bony, bilateral TMJ Ankylosis and reconstructed the region with a personalized prostheses. Within six months, the woman was able to eat, sleep, speak and breathe naturally again, for the first time since she was just a girl. “I couldn’t even believe that I’d get to live a normal life,” the woman said after her surgery.
LUCID Implants was built for complex procedures like this one … and builds solutions for complex procedures like this one.
Lucid Implants enables personalized breakthroughs
A MedTech startup accelerated by the 3DEXPERIENCE Lab, LUCID Implants is redesigning the way surgery is practiced, planned and performed. The company’s breakthrough idea is to develop personalized solutions that help patients maintain perfect aesthetics and quality of life, while minimizing tissue damage, hospitalization time and overall cost of care. Their overall solution involves:
- Virtual planning via 3D pre-surgical simulation
- Customized anatomical models for evidence-based mock surgical evaluation
- Intraoperative, patient-specific surgical guides for surgical precision
- Personalized implants
“Thanks to the team at LUCID Implants, most of our pre-surgical planning and practice was guided with their technical capabilities,” Dr. Bhola told 3DS. Not to mention: while most mandible implants look unnatural and asymmetrical, the LUCID Implants solution improves the fit and functionality with customized implants designed using single-use, patient specific instrumentation and 3D-printed replicas of patient anatomy.
Every year, there are more than a million similar cases in India, but many go unaddressed due to the high cost of imported implants that are not made to fit individual patients. Thanks to the use of technology in the planning, design and manufacturing, LUCID Implants’ personalized implants can be done at one-tenth of other procedures.
Through its relationship with the 3DEXPERIENCE Lab, LUCID Implants is able to integrate its complete surgical workflows on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform on cloud, from per-operative surgical planning in the virtual world to optimizing business processes. The team also receives mentoring from Dassault Systèmes experts as they tackle challenges such as creating virtual twins of patient models.
Ultimately, the LUCID Implants team’s vision is to make affordable, personalized solutions for facial deformations widely available and improve the lives of people around the world.
The 3DEXPERIENCE Lab is Dassault Systèmes’ open innovation laboratory designed to nurture and empower disruptive projects. Learn more about LUCID Implants and the 3DEXPERIENCE Lab.
Patrick Ball Patrick is a Senior Communications Manager on the Corporate Publishing team here at Dassault Systèmes. An experienced journalist, marketer, speechwriter and storyteller, Patrick's words have appeared on pages and stages around the world.