"He said, 'I've got a child who needs (a splint) now, ' " referring to Kaiba, said Green.

CNN: 3-D printer helps save dying baby

What followed in Kaiba's case was a painstaking process of creating the splint on the printer in layers.

CNN: 3-D printer helps save dying baby

Hollister used the results of the scan to generate a computer model of the splint.

CNN: 3-D printer helps save dying baby

What makes this a medical feat straight out of science fiction: The splint was created on a three-dimensional printer.

CNN: 3-D printer helps save dying baby

The splint will take three years to degrade, and in the meantime, Kaiba's lung should continue to develop normally, said Green.

CNN: 3-D printer helps save dying baby

He would not hold still long enough for me to splint his arm.

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Green then took the splint, measuring just a few centimeters long and 8 millimeters wide, and surgically attached it to Kaiba's collapsed bronchus.

CNN: 3-D printer helps save dying baby

When a splint is created using PCL, it becomes a sort of biological placeholder, propping up structures while the body heals around it.

CNN: 3-D printer helps save dying baby

Your dentist may recommend a mouth guard or appliance (a splint for the teeth) to protect the teeth and possibly prevent grinding.

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The next big step was getting a CT scan of Kaiba's lungs so that the splint could be fitted to his organs' exact dimensions.

CNN: 3-D printer helps save dying baby

"It's magical to me, " said Dr. Glenn Green, an associate professor of pediatric otolaryngology at the University of Michigan who implanted the splint in Kaiba.

CNN: 3-D printer helps save dying baby

Using an experimental technique never before tried on a human, they created a splint made out of biological material that effectively carved a path through Kaiba's blocked airway.

CNN: 3-D printer helps save dying baby

His great-grandson, Hugh Owen Thomas, earned himself the epithet of The Father of Modern Orthopaedics, after inventing a collar to treat osteo-tuberculosis, a wrench for reducing dislocations, and a splint, which greatly reduced deaths from fractures among late 19th Century Liverpool dockers.

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However, it was his nephew, Sir Robert Jones - Evan's great-great-grandson - who would demonstrate the true potential of the Thomas splint - using it on the Western Front, to reduce fracture deaths from 80% in 1916, to just 8% by the end of World War I.

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When asked why Mrs Richards was not in a splint with her legs straight as instructed in her medical notes, the nurse said that was the position she had been left in by the ambulance staff who had just transferred her from the Royal Haslar Hospital in Gosport.

BBC: Gladys Richards

Green, who has been practicing for two decades, and a UM colleague, biomedical engineer Scott Hollister, had been working for years toward a clinical trial to test the splint in children with pulmonary issues when they got a phone call from a physician in Ohio who was aware of their research.

CNN: 3-D printer helps save dying baby