Five years ago, if a European neurosurgery department wanted a 3D-printed model of a patient's skull for surgical planning, the file usually went out the door to a specialty vendor. According to a new longitudinal survey reported by 3D Printing Industry, that arrangement has essentially collapsed. Reliance on external companies for neurosurgical 3D printing fell from 21.81% of survey respondents in 2020 to a flat 0% in 2025 — and hospitals aren't just printing more anatomy models themselves, they've started printing implants that go into patients.
The data comes from a paper in the International Journal of Bioprinting authored by researchers affiliated with University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf and the German Armed Forces. It's built on two questionnaire rounds five years apart: 114 responses from 44 countries in 2020, and 58 responses from 19 countries in 2025, with 16 people who answered both surveys serving as a direct before-and-after comparison. That's not a huge sample by epidemiological standards, but for a niche cross-section of European neurosurgical practice, it's a rare repeated-measures look at how a specific manufacturing technology moved from procurement to production inside a single medical specialty.
The Numbers Behind the Shift
The headline figures track a workflow migrating inward, role by role. In 2020, not a single surveyed neurosurgeon reported personally operating a 3D printer — the work, when it happened at all in-house, apparently fell to other staff or was sent out. By 2025, 20.68% of respondents said they print themselves. Engineers embedded in these departments went from 1.18% involvement to 18.96%. Research staff participation rose from 0% to 12.06%. Add those categories up and it paints a picture of departments building internal printing capability across multiple job titles rather than centralizing it in one specialist role or one outside relationship.
The more striking number is what's coming off those printers. In 2020, 0% of respondents reported fabricating implants — every printed object was, by inference, a visualization or planning aid: a model of a tumor's relationship to surrounding tissue, a rehearsal skull for a complex resection. By 2025, 27.58% of respondents said they were producing implants. That's a categorical shift, not just a volume increase — printed parts moved from "helps a surgeon plan the operation" to "becomes part of the patient." The survey also notes that single-case-only use dropped from 20% to 0%, which the researchers read as evidence of routine clinical integration: departments that print now print repeatedly and as standard workflow, not as a one-off novelty for an unusual case.
Why This Happened Now
The 3D Printing Industry writeup doesn't spell out a single causal driver, and neither does the underlying journal listing, so it's worth being careful not to over-attribute. But the shape of the data is consistent with a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched a manufacturing technology mature inside an institution: falling capital costs, better in-house software and workflow tooling, and clinicians and engineers learning by doing all tend to move a capability from "outsource it" to "own it" once it becomes routine enough to justify the fixed cost of equipment and training. The survey's five-year window — 2020 to 2025 — also spans a period in which point-of-care hospital 3D printing programs generally expanded across Europe and North America, driven partly by regulatory pathways maturing for patient-specific medical devices. None of that is stated in the sourced reporting as an explicit explanation, but it's the backdrop against which the numbers make sense.
What It Means for Makers
This isn't a story about desktop FDM printers suddenly showing up in operating rooms — the survey doesn't specify hardware, materials, or process (FDM, SLA, SLS, or metal powder-bed fusion could all plausibly be involved for anatomical models versus load-bearing implants, and the sourced reporting doesn't break that out). What it does confirm is a demand signal: European hospitals are standing up internal print labs staffed by a mix of surgeons, engineers, and researchers rather than routing files to outside bureaus. For anyone in the medical-device or point-of-care 3D printing supply chain — software vendors doing surgical planning and segmentation, materials companies working on biocompatible and implant-grade filaments or resins, service bureaus that used to own this niche — the practical takeaway is that the customer relationship is changing shape. The vendor role shifts from "print this for the hospital" to "sell the hospital the printer, the software, and the certification pathway to print it themselves."
For makers with a more general interest in medical applications of 3D printing, the implant figure is the number to watch going forward. Going from zero to over a quarter of surveyed departments producing implants in five years is a fast trajectory for a use case that carries real regulatory weight — implants are patient-specific medical devices, not props, and typically require far more rigorous material qualification, sterilization validation, and traceability than an anatomical teaching model. The survey doesn't detail how these 27.58% of respondents are navigating that regulatory burden, which is arguably the more interesting follow-up question the underlying paper may or may not answer in full: was implant printing happening under existing point-of-care manufacturing exemptions, custom-device pathways, or some other regulatory route common across the 19 countries represented in 2025? That's outside what's been reported so far.
Bottom Line
A five-year before-and-after survey of European neurosurgery departments shows outsourced 3D printing dropping to zero while in-house involvement — by surgeons, engineers, and research staff alike — climbs sharply, and printed output shifts from purely anatomical models toward actual implants used in routine, repeated clinical practice rather than single-case experiments. It's a small sample, but a rare one with a direct 2020-to-2025 comparison, and it points toward point-of-care hospital manufacturing becoming a normal part of neurosurgical practice in Europe rather than a novelty pilot program.
