Mayo Clinic’s in-house 3D printing revolution

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A new profile highlights how the Mayo Clinic has quietly built one of the world’s most advanced hospital-based 3D-printing operations—an around-the-clock manufacturing service embedded directly into clinical workflows. Led by Dr. Jonathan Morris, a neuroradiologist and Co-founder of the Anatomic Modeling Unit (AMU), the system turns surgeon orders from the electronic medical record into patient-specific models, cutting guides, and sterilizable tools for the operating room.. The goal is simple but radical: manufacture exactly what each patient needs, at clinical speed, directly inside the hospital.

Unlike commercial 3D-printing companies, Mayo Clinic focuses on cases too niche or complex for industry to tackle. Surgeons request models only when clinically justified—whether for intricate jaw reconstruction, high-risk tumour removal, or unusual anatomy where a life-size model helps both planning and “rehearsal.” The lab has also created devices industry would never scale, such as lightweight custom breast prostheses and radiation-therapy accessories tailored to individual patients. For Mayo, the “return on investment” is purely clinical: better outcomes and greater surgical confidence.

Behind the scenes, this hospital factory operates like a regulated industrial facility. An 18-person team manages everything from specialized imaging protocols and precise anatomical segmentation to industrial-grade printers, metrology checks, and validated sterilization. Accuracy is tightly controlled—printed guides deviate by less than a millimeter—and the entire process is integrated from EMR to OR. The lab operates under the practice of medicine, meaning devices are produced only for Mayo patients, while the team works with the FDA and medical societies to build evidence and reimbursement pathways, including efforts to move 3D printing from temporary to fully recognized CPT codes.

The hardest challenge, Morris notes, is reliability. Commercial 3D printers often lack the consistency needed in a surgical environment, so Mayo over-provisions machines and trains staff to factory-level standards. But the payoff is the ability to manufacture care itself: producing tools and solutions tailored to rare conditions, complex reconstructions, and one-off clinical needs that no company can justify. The model shows how point-of-care manufacturing can reshape modern medicine—one patient-specific device at a time.