Cost Minimization of Artificial Hip Bone Implantation Surgery by Adopting Additive Manufacturing Technique and Its Feasibility Assessment

Osteoarthritis (OA) of the hip is the most common joint disease in elderly people and associated with significant physical disability. Pain relief is a primary treatment of hip OA. When the patient with hip OA has failed medical treatment modalities and remains in pain, the patient should be referred for hip replacement surgery in which the damaged surfaces of the joint is removed and replaced with a set of artificial ball-and-socket implants. In this research, a proposition for Additive Manufacturing (AM) is advocated to produce the bone implant to enhance the customer satisfaction along with minimization of costs. AM primarily differs from traditional material removal process because it creates product by successive deposits of material layer by layer. Because of this difference, the cost and operational methodologies are distinct from traditional manufacturing. For this reason, additive manufacturing is adopted for this artificial bone manufacturing and a stochastic optimization model is proposed to help a manufacturer decide when AM is best for them.