A 3D-printed heart that saves babies
Seven 3D-printed models of defective hearts were announced by a research surgeon at the medical congress of the American Heart Association on November 19. A few rare infants have already benefitted from this diagnostic aid.
A 3D-printed heart that saves babies… This Christmas tale is about to become reality. After working to perfect digital replicas of the human heart, U.S. researchers have successfully saved very young lives by diagnosing heart defects in infants and operating to fix them. The 3D-printed heart is yet another aid for the surgeon, whose decision is already based on an arsenal of scanners and other 3D images. But these images can only be seen on a 2D screen. When it comes down to the heartbeat of a foetus, 3D printing has a lot of advantages.
3D replicas of the human heart
Presented during the medical congress of the American Heart Association in Chicago on November 19, the 3D replicas of infant hearts allowed a surgeon to see that one infant’s heart looked like Swiss cheese, while inspiring another surgeon to use a technique that tripled the infant’s lifespan. Dr. Matthew Bramlet, pediatric cardiologist at the Children’s Hospital of Illinois and member of the research team at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria, which developed this 3D printing technique, admits that these results do not have universal value. However, they are encouraging enough to suggest that 3D printing may be an integral part of diagnosing and treating cardiac surgery in the near future.
Infants with heart defects often struggle to survive during their first months of life. Once the problem has been diagnosed, and the infant has undergone an initial procedure, it must wait another six to nine months before undergoing a full operation (once the heart has doubled in size). Even at nine months, a baby’s heart is still so small that the defect is not always identifiable in IRMs, Dr. Bramlet explains.
Swiss cheese-shaped heart
His team decided to convert the IRM into 3D models and then print them in two or three parts (so that they could examine each cross-section), which almost immediately helped pediatric surgeons in their practice. In the first case, the IRM suggested that the infant had a hole in the wall of one of the ventricles—a septal defect that is usually easily treated. But the 3D prints revealed several holes, which needed to be sealed… Instead of discovering the problem during the operation, the surgeon was able to limit the infant’s cardiac arrest time, according to Dr. Bramlet.
One of the open source 3D-printed heart models :
Since then, almost a dozen 3D replicas of infant hearts have been printed by Dr. Bramlet’s team, and all have helped surgeons to refine their diagnosis and operation. Sixty years ago, only 20 % of newborns with complicated heart defects reached adulthood. Today, that number has grown to 90 %. As 3D printing becomes more common, it could soon be 100 % !
Prenatal diagnosis
Apparently, the race to innovate is open. In October, Erle Austin, head surgeon at Kosair Children’s Hospital in Kentucky, explained at Maker Faire Rome how he had saved a child’s life thanks to 3D printing : “If I went in and did surgery, took off the front of the heart and did irreparable damage, the child would not survive.” Elsewhere in the U.S., surgeons at NewYork-Presbyterian/Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital successfully operated on a one-week old infant last summer, after diagnosing a defect using 3D printing before the baby was born. The child was saved with a single operation.
It’s not surprising that the United States have taken the lead in this field. According to a market study by IDTechEx, the medical 3D printing sector could grow from $186 million in 2014 to $868 million by 2025… Of course, a large majority of the funding will go toward dentistry and orthopedic implants, but ears, hips and hearts are also on the shortlist.
The University of Illinois has since made available seven 3D models of defective hearts, thanks to a partnership with NIH 3D Print Exchange, a biomedical platform for sharing 3D models (a public initiative which advocates for open source biomedical 3D printing). These first seven models will help apprentice surgeons as well as surgeons themselves…