Abstract
Additive manufacturing (AM or called 3D printing) is a rapidly emerging technology, which enables mass customization for industrial and consumer products. Most of the countries and enterprises are actively involving in the R&D of the AM technologies. The features of AM or 3D printing applications for one-of-the-kind or small quantity of products are very suitable for manufacturing biomedical parts or devices. For example, the auxiliary prosthetic parts in vitro, bionic scaffold in vivo, or explants must be produced based on the patients' specifications. This research analyzes patent evolution to explore 3D printing technology innovations applied specifically. First, the related patents are searched and collected from the global patent databases. Then, through text mining and data mining, the key concepts of patents are dynamically extracted based on the key terms. The extracted and ranked key terms are treated as attributes in patent clustering and similarity analysis. Finally, we use the modified formal concept analysis (MFCA) as a way to analyze technology trends and graphically display of the MFCA results for four clusters of patents. The opportunities and potential of AM R&D in the biomedical domains are visualized based on the MFCA evolution map. This research can provide advanced AM R&D and IP information to domestic enterprises in the industry for formulating their strategies and avoiding patent infringement.