Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Emerging Tech
  3. News

Surgeons used a 3D printed heart to practice complicated surgery on a 4 year old girl

By

3d printed heart surgery
Image used with permission by copyright holder
From space exploration to R/C car racing and everything in between, 3D printing is changing the world in a big way. Even medicine is embracing the technology, with physicians turning to additive manufacturing technology to make artificial body parts for amputees and for transplant surgeries. Recently, the technology was used in the case of a four-year-old girl, Mia Gonzalez, who needed a complicated heart surgery to chanbe her life.

Gonzalez spent the first four years of her life battling colds, pneumonia and other respiratory problems. Doctors diagnosed her with asthma and prescribed medication to help her breath, but they soon realized asthma was not the source of her maladies. Instead, the four-year-old had a double aortic arch that was putting pressure on her windpipe, making it difficult for her to breath and to cough up phlegm when she had a cold.

Recommended Videos

The procedure to fix the aortic defect required a complicated open heart surgery procedure, which prompted surgeons at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami to turn to 3D printing to help them prepare for the surgery. The hospital earlier this year received their first 3D printer, which already was being used by surgeons to make replicas of organs. These simulated organs allowed the physicians to study the organ ahead of the surgery and even practice the procedure in advance.

Director of pediatric cardiovascular surgery Dr. Redmond Burke used this technology to produce a 3D version of Gonzalez’s heart. The surgeon carried around the model, showing it to other surgeons as he sought their advice on the procedure. After studying the child’s heart, Burke had a breakthrough that would make surgery easier for the surgeon and his patient. “Without the model, I would have been less certain about (operating on Mia) and that would have led me naturally to make a larger incision that could possibly cause more pain and a longer recovery time,” Burke said.

Burke and his colleagues at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital have used the 3D printer successfully for 25 patients with congenital heart defects. Some of these patients would have been rejected for surgery had it not been for the 3D models. The Florida hospital is one of 75 hospitals in the US and 200 worldwide that use 3D printing.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Kelly Hodgkins
Kelly Hodgkins
Contributor
Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…
Wild new 3D printer makes parts by sending titanium particles supersonic
3D printing metal technique

Regular layer-by-layer 3D printing is old news compared to a new additive manufacturing technique developed by an international team of engineers. They recently demonstrated an innovative method for printing 3D metal objects by firing a powder that’s composed of tiny titanium particles, at supersonic speed, so that they fuse together in any interesting way.

This “cold spray” approach takes place below the melting temperature of the metal. When the particles hit the substrate at high enough velocity, they deform and adhere to it. The efficiency of this adhesion increases as the particle velocity increases. Without the high-speed impact, metal powders would simply not adhere well.

Read more
GPS-tracking, 3D-printed decoy eggs can help root out illegal poachers
Decoy turtle eggs

Poachers pose a major threat to sea turtle nests by stealing eggs to sell in what has become a rampant black market trade in certain parts of the world. Conservation efforts to stop this have, to date, included patrolling beaches for would-be poachers, as well as removing the eggs and placing them in a secure hatchery so that they can be incubated in safety.

Conservationists at the nonprofit organization Paso Pacifico in Nicaragua and researchers from the U.K.’s University of Kent have another idea, however -- and it involves 3D-printed decoy eggs, boasting built-in GPS trackers.

Read more
Printable wood biopaste could be the sustainable future of 3D printing
Biopaste 3D printing

Researchers at Germany’s University of Freiburg may have found a way to make 3D printing a bit more environmentally friendly -- by printing with a new material best described as a wood-based biopaste. After all, who needs boring, unsustainable plastics when you’ve got an alternative that works impressively well, made out of wood biopolymers cellulose and lignin?

Marie-Pierre Laborie, the lead researcher on the project, told Digital Trends that creating the printable material is straightforward. “We put each component, a cellulose-based derivative and lignin, into [a] solution and blend the two … to form a sort of paste of high-solid content,” Laborie said. “At [a] particular solid content and composition, we retain the lyotropic liquid crystalline behavior of the cellulose derivative. This facilitates the processing of the paste. The paste then solidifies thanks to the stabilizing effect of the lignin upon 3D printing.”

Read more