A team of vascular surgeons in Medellín, Colombia, has shown that combining AI-assisted imaging with low-cost 3D printing can make it easier and safer to build patient-specific stent grafts.Their study, published in Cureus, tackles a longstanding problem in vascular surgery: how to precisely modify stent-grafts for patients whose anatomy doesn’t match standard, commercially available devices.To solve this, the surgeons designed a custom cylindrical plastic template, printed on a desktop FDM machine, that lets them “map out” exactly where to cut the openings (or fenestrations) on the real medical stent-graft before surgery.
AI-assisted 3D planning and surgical marking of a patient-specific fenestrated endograft.When doctors repair aneurysms or other diseases in the abdominal aorta, they often rely on endografts, tube-like stents covered in fabric, that reinforce the weakened vessel.But the aorta isn’t simple.
It has critical branches that feed the kidneys, stomach, liver, and intestines.If a commercial stent covers those arteries, it can cut off blood flow.Manufacturers do offer custom “fenestrated” or “branched” grafts with openings built in, but those devices are expensive and can take weeks or months to produce.
But many hospitals can’t wait that long.That’s why surgeons often modify off-the-shelf grafts by hand when a fully custom device isn’t available or would take too long to manufacture.It’s delicate work.
If any fenestration is off by even a few millimeters, the surgeon risks blocking the arteries that supply the kidneys, liver, or intestines.What’s more, getting it right requires experience, careful measurement, and sometimes even guesswork.A tiny error can lead to a major complication.
The team behind this new method wanted to simplify that process.The group, based at Clínica Medellín, includes Juan Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Jesús Rosso, Bárbara Dieck, Edison Peña, and Andrés Cadavid, and their idea is incredibly straightforward.First, they use AI-assisted software to quickly trace the patient’s aorta and its branching vessels.
Then they turn that data into a cylindrical model and print it on a Creality Ender 3 V2.The finished piece is a hollow PLA sleeve shaped to the patient’s aorta, with precise markers showing where each branch artery originates.Finally, just before surgery, they slide the commercial graft over this cylinder and mark the exact locations for the fenestrations.
Of course, the plastic guide never enters the body; it’s simply a planning tool that replaces the old guesswork with actual geometry.Because the surgeons do the graft-modification step inside the operating room (OR), the printed template still needs to be sterilized so it can be safely handled next to the sterile graft.The template itself is cheap, prints in under an hour, and is made directly by the surgical team using Creality Slicer and standard PLA on the printer.
Once printed, it’s sterilized with low-temperature hydrogen peroxide plasma so the team can use it in the OR while preparing the patient’s customized stent-graft.Screenshot of the 3D Slicer Segmentation module showing the fenestrated aortic model.Because the printed sleeve matches the patient’s anatomy, it makes the whole process easier to understand and helps prevent mistakes when marking the graft.
In their report, the surgeons describe using this method successfully on their first patient, a 78-year-old man with an infrarenal abdominal aortic aneurysm and prior failed endovascular aortic aneurysm repair (EVAR).This “proof-of-concept case” shows that a desktop 3D printer can produce an accurate, durable guide for customizing a fenestrated stent-graft in the hospital, without waiting for expensive, industrial fabrication.What’s more, the printed template gives surgeons a simple way to mark grafts with far better accuracy.
Because the process doesn’t require specialized engineering support, it could be adopted widely, which is a useful advantage in urgent cases where every millimeter matters.Creation and reinforcement of fenestrations on the surgeon-modified endograft.For the broader stent-graft field, this kind of work reflects a clear shift.
Demand for complex aneurysm repairs keeps rising, but fully custom devices remain costly and, in regions such as Latin America, can take weeks or months to arrive.These delays are one reason why surgeon-modified grafts (PMEGs) have become so important.The work from Clínica Medellín also fits into a larger trend linking 3D printing and vascular surgery.
Printing entire stents is still in its early stages, but several groups are already pushing the boundaries.Programs at the Cleveland Clinic and Mayo Clinic have used customized, 3D printed airway stents under the FDA’s “compassionate-use” pathway.In Barcelona, the QuirofAM program, together with CIM, GEMAT, and Tractivus, has produced early prototypes of directly printed silicone tracheal stents.
In Australia, CSIRO’s Lab22 and the Medical Innovation Hub created the first 3D printed nitinol stent using laser powder bed fusion.The promise is the same across all of these projects: more customized devices that fit patients who don’t fit the standard catalog of products available today.Postoperative 3D volume rendering of the fenestrated endograft reconstruction.
Taken together, these efforts show that personalization is becoming central to next-generation implant design, even as the basic technologies develop at different speeds.This study also reminds the industry of something that could be easy to overlook: the fact that innovation doesn’t always come from large manufacturers.Sometimes it comes from research teams solving immediate problems for their patients.
Images courtesy of Gómez-Rodríguez et al., Cureus (2025).CC BY 4.0 Subscribe to Our Email Newsletter Stay up-to-date on all the latest news from the 3D printing industry and receive information and offers from third party vendors.Print Services Upload your 3D Models and get them printed quickly and efficiently.
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