New 3D printed heart model to help with heart disorders
Patients who are born with complicated heart disorders may soon have the ability to have an experimental 3-dimensional printed model of the heart, according to research presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2014.
The heart replicas are designed to match every tiny detail of a baby's heart, so they can help surgeons plan where to cut tissue, reroute piping and patch holes in children with congenital heart defects, researchers said.
The new findings were presented Nov. 19 at the American Heart Association meeting in Chicago.
"With 3D printing, surgeons can make better decisions before they go into the operating room. The more prepared they are, the better decisions they make, and the fewer surprises that they encounter," said Matthew Bramlet, assistant professor and director of the Congenital Heart Disease MRI Programme at the University of Illinois.
Currently, most heart surgeons use 2D images taken by X-ray, ultrasound and MRI for surgical planning.
"The very first case we did, where we're looking at the complex intracardiac anatomy using this process to evaluate the actual anatomy rather than a volumetric pressure image, it changed the surgery," Bramlet told Cardiovascular Business.
The surgeon in that case, Bramlet noted, found a Swiss-cheese-type ventricular septal defect (VSD) through the 3D model that had previously gone undetected. "This hole can reside between the main two ventricles and when a larger VSD is present, [it] can evade detection. I personally hadn't even noticed it. But the surgeon, who has the frame of reference for what a Swiss-cheese VSD looks like when he's in the operating room, instantly recognized it."
Researchers caution that this was a small study and 3-D printing is still an emerging technology that is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
