Colorado firm on the cutting edge
ProtoMed creates models for surgeons
Bill Scanlon, Rocky Mountain News
Published November 28, 2006 at midnight
When you're separating Siamese twins, or removing a basketball-sized tumor from a human face, it's essential to know exactly where and what you're cutting.
A small suburban Denver company has been giving surgeons the world over that edge by creating precise plastic models of the deformities they are trying to correct.
ProtoMed, which has offices in Arvada and a manufacturing facility in Westminster, was involved in the case of Marlie Casseus, a 14-year- old Haitian girl afflicted by a 16-pound tumor on her face whose story was featured in Monday's Rocky Mountain News.
Dr. Jesse Gomez led the teams operating on Marlie at Holtz Children's Hospital in Miami. He relied on ProtoMed to help him determine where the deformity started and the normal facial structure began.
ProtoMed President Connie Cameron, who has a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Colorado, spent several years in the technical ceramics division of Coors Brewing Co.
When the entrepreneurial bug bit, she knew she wanted to do something in the medical field. She teamed with mechanical engineer James Jimenez to form ProtoMed.
They purchased software from a Belgian company that had come up with the idea of using MRIs and CT scans to bring the world of stereolithography to surgery.
Stereolithography uses polyurethane resin to build everything from respiratory masks to street lamps, gaskets and keypads.
In Marlie's case and others like it, ProtoMed technicians start with a liquid resin in a vat about 10 inches square, Cameron said.
Information from an MRI or CT scan is fed into an instrument with a laser, which produces an exact plastic model of the body part being re-created.
The process of making something solid out of something liquid is well suited in reproducing the human anatomy, which has so many intricacies, Cameron said.
Five years ago, ProtoMed created the model of the spine that connected Siamese twins Syd and Lexi, who were separated at Children's Hospital in Denver by a team led by Dr. Michael Handler.
More commonly, the company is called on to make models of jaws, hips and other parts for joint replacement surgery. Rather than use a stock implant from the shelf, doctors prefer to design an implant to the exact specifications of the person who will be living with it.
"It's very rewarding work," Cameron said, "helping somebody in need."
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