KLS Martin Scales Personalized Surgery with Industrial 3D Printing

Personalized jaw reconstruction demands a production workflow unlike anything in standard medical device manufacturing. Each case is a batch of one: a unique implant geometry derived from an individual patient’s anatomy, paired with a matched set of drilling and marking guides that ensure the surgeon can execute the virtual plan with sub-millimeter fidelity.

The guides carry a deceptively demanding specification. Used intraoperatively to position resection lines, pre-drill holes, and project the donor bone graft onto the recipient site, they must be lightweight, sterilizable, and dimensionally stable, yet economical enough to be discarded after a single use.

And because the guide is produced separately from the titanium implant it serves, it has to hold its geometry tightly enough that the two parts agree in the OR. Variability between the plan, the guide, and the implant is exactly what a personalized workflow cannot tolerate.

That combination - clinical-grade precision, biocompatibility, sterilizability, design freedom that adapts to each injury and patient, and per-unit cost low enough for single use - is difficult to satisfy with conventional manufacturing. It’s the kind of requirement that makes personalized guides either clinically excellent or economically viable, rarely both. KLS Martin needed a guide production process that delivered all of it at once - reproducibly, at industrial scale, and in a way that could sustain a continuously growing caseload over many years of clinical use.

By building its surgical guides on EOS SLS machines KLS Martin has made personalized guides that are simultaneously clinically precise and economically producible - the trade-off that usually limits how widely such guides can be deployed. The long-term performance of the solution underscores its maturity: over more than ten years of continuous operation, KLS Martin has scaled its personalized guide production into a sustained, industrialized workflow, reliably supporting a high and steadily growing surgical caseload while maintaining consistent quality and process stability.

From a purely clinical perspective, the payoff shows up in the operating room. Guides printed in PA 2200, with integrated steel sleeves and high positional accuracy, transfer the virtual plan faithfully enough to support reduced complication rates, improved aesthetic and functional results, shorter operating times, and faster patient rehabilitation. The implant arrives with an optimal dimensional fit, and the matched guide ensures the surgeon can place it as planned.

From a production perspective, the benefits compound. With guide sets printing in roughly 24 minutes, KLS Martin can serve a growing surgical caseload without scaling manual labor or infrastructure in proportion. SLS design freedom means each new case geometry is a parameter of the same validated process rather than a new manufacturing problem. And EOS PA 2200’s biocompatibility and sterilizability make single-use guides routine, keeping per-case economics in check while holding clinical quality constant.

The mechanical and dimensional performance is what ties it together: A guide is only useful if it behaves predictably under handling and in the surgical field, and holds the tolerance that lets a separately produced titanium implant fit as intended.