We all know that any skill involving dexterity can be improved with practice, but for surgeons, every patient is different and in a very real sense, every time is a first time. Enter the marriage of Computer Tomography and 3D printing.

Surgeons from Kobe University in Japan have brought the two technologies together to create exact scale models of patients’ cancerous kidneys – using different materials to differentiate between healthy and diseased tissue, and allowing surgeons to see the locations of interior blood vessels before the procedure.

Details and images can be found here, and here’s a short video clip.