3D printing of microscope slides for visually impaired university students

The paper presents a collaboration between the Microcontrollers and Biomedical Instrumentation Laboratory and the University Service in charge of providing assistance to disabled students (in Italian, Centro Servizio Assistenza e Integrazione Studenti Disabili e con DSA - SAISD). The aim is to give visually impaired students additional tactile tools to integrate their residual visual information. In particular, 3D printing techniques allow developing models of 2D images by enhancing useful details with different levels of height. Students of Medicine Faculty have evaluated the first prototypical 3D printed objects with positive results. In fact, microscope images of tissues are particularly complex due to their high level of details and thus they represent a good starting point to verify the approach. Moreover, the same kind of figures, together with organs (healthy and pathological) can be used not only in the medical area, but also for biomedical engineering students; therefore, it can be considered as a first outcome for the successive step of 3D printing images in additional different engineering areas.