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Among thoracic malformations, pectus deformities have the highest incidence and can result in a wide range of severe and mild clinical manifestations. Recently, the treatment of pectus deformities is shifting from traditional approaches toward customized solutions. This occurs by leveraging innovative rapid prototyping tools that allow for the design and fabrication of patient-specific treatments and medical devices. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive view of the growing literature in this area to analyze the progress made in this direction.

The search was performed on major search engines through keywords inherent to reverse engineering (RE) and additive manufacturing (AM) technologies applied to pectus deformities and related treatments, selecting 54 papers. These were analyzed according to the addressed pathology, the hardware and software tools used and/or implemented and their integration within the clinical pathway.

First, the analysis led to analyze and divide the papers according to how RE and AM technologies are applied for surgical and non-surgical treatments, pathological assessment and preoperative simulation and planning. Second, all papers were considered within the typical rapid prototyping framework consisting of the three phases of three-dimensional (3D) scanning, 3D modelling and 3D printing.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, to date, no survey has provided a comprehensive view of innovative and personalized treatment strategies for thoracic malformations; the present work fills this gap, allowing researchers in this field to have access to the most promising findings on the treatment and evaluation of pathology.

This paper aims to argue about the involvement of additive technologies (ATs) in the prototyping issues of designing. More precisely, it reviews the literature contributions focused on the different perspectives of prototyping activities for design purposes, searching for both available knowledge and research needs concerning the correct exploitation of ATs.

A two-step literature review has been performed. In the first step, general information has been retrieved about prototyping issues related to design. In the second step, the literature searches were focused on retrieving more detailed information about ATs, concerning each of the main issues identified in the previous step. Extracted information has been analyzed and discussed for understanding the actual coverage of the arguments and for identifying possible research needs.

Four generally valid prototyping issues have been identified in the first step of the literature review. For each of them, available information and current lacks have been identified and discussed about the involvement of AT, allowing to extract six different research hints for future works.

This is the first literature review concerning AT-focused contributions that cover the complex and inter-disciplinary issues characterizing prototyping activities in design contexts.