One of my department’s intensivists, Luca Bigatello, participates in classroom outreach events teaching about common medical conditions. He was looking to integrate a 3D printed teaching model into his presentations to both garner interest from the high schoolers and minimize cost as quality medical models can easily cost in the thousands of dollars.

Luca didn’t have an exact item he was looking for but was going to be discussing respiratory diseases and gave me free reign to come up with something interesting to show.

I started by browsing the open source community for model ideas. I found a cool model from designer FHEDER on cults3D of a healthy vs. inflamed bronchi.

I wanted to print the models as a multicolor print. I initially tried to separate the model into multiple parts in CAD to make it easy to define the components as different filament colors but this proved to be challenging due to the model’s complexity. Then I tried simply importing the solid model into the native Bambu Studio painting environment to assign filament colors. The function was very easy to use and lightyears better than other products I had used.

After planning the model coloring in Bambu Studio, I set the model to print on a Bambu X1C with 4 colors of PLA loaded into the AMS (Automatic Material System) and printed the models at 0.2 mm layer height.

The models came out nice and Luca was happy to take them. He stated that the it was a great addition to his talk and the fact that they were 3D printed increased the interest level among a number of the students.