The technology was developed in the 1980s mainly to produce small volumes of scale models; much attention lately has focused on hobbyists printing functional guns. But the shift from the garage to the factory floor has begun. Additive manufacturing is poised to almost triple in value to about $6 billion annually worldwide by 2017, according to one estimate, boosted in part by a recent decision by General Electric Co. to spend tens of millions of dollars “printing” fuel nozzles for its newest jet engine.

But adoption of 3-D printing is happening fastest in the medical industry. Commercially, companies such as Beltone, a Glenview-based hearing-aid maker, uses 3-D printing to make the majority of its hearing aids, and Kalamazoo, Mich.-based Stryker Corp. uses it to produce knee implants. With the Midwest's cluster of research institutions and manufacturing expertise, this region is emerging as fertile ground for developing clinical uses for 3-D printing.

There are still significant regulatory hurdles to the widespread use of 3-D implants and prosthetics, though. So the technology's most immediate impact is on personalized surgery and pre-surgical planning. The ability to create a 3-D print directly from CT scans and MRIs allows Drs. Fortuna and Bramlet, and others like them, an unprecedented level of insight into a patient's anatomy before ever setting scalpel to skin.

“The overall direction is to make complex operations simpler,” says Dr. Bohdan Pomahac, 43, a plastic surgeon at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston and a pioneer in facial transplants who uses 3-D printing to plan his surgeries. “This may be one of the most profound tools that we hope to use in the coming future.”