Vietnamese doctors at Vinmec have achieved world-first success in replacing the entire femur of an eight-year-old boy with a personalized 3D-printed implant, reports Vietnam News (VNS).
T.M.D., a boy from Ho Chi Minh City, was diagnosed with osteosarcoma in October 2022 after a minor fall. The tumour had invaded his entire left femur, a condition rarely seen in children and typically carrying a poor prognosis. Standard treatments risked amputation or complications from graft rejection.
Vinmec International Hospital took an unprecedented approach. “We proposed replacing the entire femur with personalized 3D-printed materials for the child patient, an unprecedented solution for children,” Prof. Trần Trung Dũng of the Vinmec Healthcare System told VNS.
The surgery was performed in May 2025, using a custom-designed, adjustable 3D-printed metal implant tailored precisely to the child’s anatomy. The design and manufacturing were entirely the job of a domestic team of doctors and engineers.
Vinmec is now the first medical facility in Việt Nam to apply customized 3D printing technology in musculoskeletal treatment. Instead of standardised prosthetics, it creates implants based on patient-specific CT-MRI data for optimised mobility and minimal post-operative complications.
As of now, the young patient is learning to walk again and showing “good recovery results, without complications of infection or transplant rejection,” according to VNS. “This is also the first time Vietnamese medicine has applied this technology to the world’s youngest bone cancer patient,” added Prof. Dũng.
