There are some amazing things being done using 3D printing by the surgeons at the Mayo Clinic and other institutions around the country. There were several times that I was sitting in the audience thinking, I don't follow national surgeon rankings, but I know this person is the Michael Jordan of what they do.
While 3D printing in the medical context started out helping doctors visualize surgical cases that were truly corner cases (like the separation of conjoined twins at the Mayo Clinic), there is also much evidence that more routine surgical procedures benefit from the fact that 3D imaging and printing allows for the creation of patient-specific visualization tools, surgical guides, templates and as they would say in the carpentry world "jigs." I will discuss some of those clinical applications below.