Doctors rarely make house calls, but if you give them a chance to see their technology ideas become reality, they won’t hesitate to pay you a visit.
That, at least, has been the experience of engineers at Medtronic Sofamor Danek, a manufacturer of tools and implants for spinal surgery. Surgeons from across the country visit Sofamor’s assembly plant and development lab in Memphis, TN, to have their ideas for new surgical instruments turned into functional prototypes. One of the lab’s most important machines is the Fortus fused-deposition modeling (FDM) system from Stratasys Inc.