3D-Printed Heart Valve Models Are Real Lifesavers
Heart valve models created with advanced 3D printers by researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology and the Piedmont Heart Institute could soon assist cardiologists in preparing to perform life-saving heart valve replacements. The researchers are using standard medical imaging and new 3D printing technologies to create patient-specific heart valve models that mimic the look and feel of the real valves. Their aim is to improve the success rate of transcatheter aortic valve replacements (TAVR) by picking the right prosthetic and avoiding a common complication known as paravalvular leakage.
Transcript
00:00:02 about two years ago we were approached by a group of surgeons and medical doctors from uh Pont Hospital and what they wanted was a 3D printed heart well this is about the treatment called Tava trans cathet arotic V replacement so this is for patients with severe arotic sosis so it's like a very severe narrowed erotical valve we think 3D printing can play a really good the role
00:00:30 in solving that problem what Pon wants to do is to use this 3D printer valve as a test piece that can maybe uh validate their selection of the St that are put into the patient they want to make sure that they they select the right size they try the right location so that they can optimize their surgery we started to design some small samples we find we can sort of um mimic the human tissues
00:01:01 string stiffening property so for the biom material when you stretch it it become more more and more difficult but for the polymer material it will gets more more and more relaxed so when you stretch it it become easier and easier so to overcome this kind of a difference we designed a stiff uh meta structures inside of the of the the soft material we're printing a lot of the uh Hardware
00:01:30 off mimicking you know different patients and then we use a new like machine learning techniques to uh uh basically extract useful data from the uh past experience or lessons so next step is that we are going to use printed Electronics Technologies like aerojet printing to print the sensor directly onto the the wall of the valve and when we when we do
00:01:56 a flow test like like this we can basically have the have the signal the string signal uh in real time so it's very exciting to actually say our ideas get some real use in in the real world