Ashlee Vance explains how Neuralink uses 3D printing to recreate brain blood vessels for surgical planning. The process involves extracting vessel data from scans, 3D-printing veins, and using an inkjet printer with collagen to produce realistic artery patterns.
So your brain has two types of blood vessels in it. It has veins and arteries. Arteries bring the blood in and veins bring the blood out. You can see where the blood flow is. And so from the scan, we can extract that region right where we're gonna drill the hole and then 3D print those veins, spray paint them to look real. The harder one are the arteries. We actually just take a regular inkjet printer, feed sausage skin collagen into it, print some artery-looking pattern onto it.
