In order to meet the needs of surgical guide plates for short-time design and producing circles, precise positioning and convenient operation, a method of all-digital rapid design and manufacture for metal customized surgical guide plates was proposed by using reverse-engineering, forward-design and selective laser melting technologies.Based on analysis of surgical needs, the method for shortening manufacture time, reducing plate weight and improving plate dimensional accuracy was figured out and both near-full-density-state forming and porous-state forming were investigated.The later used a high scanning speed to produce porous light part and shorten producing time, meanwhile it used offsetting scanning lines in two adjacent layers, orthogonal scanning and partition scanning to improve dimensional accuracy.Finally, according to the above ideas, a surgical guide plate model was designed successfully, and two metal guide plates were manufactured by porous-state forming and near-full-density-state forming , respectively.Results show that the dimensional accuracies of two plates are all ± 0.5 mm,but the manufacture time and weight of the porous plate have decreased by 43.3% and 18.2% as compared with that of the near-full density plate.The guide plate made by this method has been successfully applied to a surgery.