Centre for Human Anatomy Education, Department of Anatomy and Developmental Biology, Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia.
Earth Sciences, University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales, Australia.
Am J Phys Anthropol. 2018 Oct;167(2):400-406. doi: 10.1002/ajpa.23640. Epub 2018 Aug 20.
Rapid prototyping (RP) technology is becoming more affordable, faster, and is now capable of building models with a high resolution and accuracy. Due to technological limitations, 3D printing in biological anthropology has been mostly limited to museum displays and forensic reconstructions. In this study, we compared the accuracy of different 3D printers to establish whether RP can be used effectively to reproduce anthropological dental collections, potentially replacing access to oftentimes fragile and irreplaceable original material.
We digitized specimens from the Yuendumu collection of Australian Aboriginal dental casts using a high-resolution white-light scanning system and reproduced them using four different 3D printing technologies: stereolithography (SLA); fused deposition modeling (FDM); binder-jetting; and material-jetting. We compared the deviations between the original 3D surface models with 3D print scans using color maps generated from a 3D metric deviation analysis.
The 3D printed models reproduced both the detail and discrete morphology of the scanned dental casts. The results of the metric deviation analysis demonstrate that all 3D print models were accurate, with only a few small areas of high deviations. The material-jetting and SLA printers were found to perform better than the other two printing machines.
The quality of current commercial 3D printers has reached a good level of accuracy and detail reproduction. However, the costs and printing times limit its application to produce large sample numbers for use in most anthropological studies. Nonetheless, RP offers a viable option to preserve numerically constraint fragile skeletal and dental material in paleoanthropological collections.
快速原型（RP）技术变得更加经济实惠、速度更快，现在能够以高分辨率和高精度构建模型。由于技术限制，生物人类学中的 3D 打印主要限于博物馆展示和法医重建。在这项研究中，我们比较了不同 3D 打印机的准确性，以确定 RP 是否可以有效地用于复制人类学牙齿收藏，从而可能替代对经常易碎且不可替代的原始材料的访问。
我们使用高分辨率白光扫描系统对澳大利亚原住民牙模 Yuendumu 收藏中的标本进行数字化，并使用四种不同的 3D 打印技术对其进行复制：立体光固化（SLA）；熔融沉积建模（FDM）；粘结剂喷射；和材料喷射。我们使用从三维度量偏差分析生成的彩色地图比较原始 3D 表面模型与 3D 打印扫描之间的偏差。
3D 打印模型再现了扫描牙模的细节和离散形态。度量偏差分析的结果表明，所有 3D 打印模型都很准确，只有少数小区域的偏差较大。材料喷射和 SLA 打印机的性能优于其他两种印刷机。
目前商业 3D 打印机的质量已经达到了良好的准确性和细节再现水平。然而，成本和打印时间限制了其在大多数人类学研究中用于生产大量样本数量的应用。尽管如此，RP 为保存古人类学收藏中数量有限的脆弱骨骼和牙齿材料提供了一种可行的选择。
