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3D Printing Patient-Specific Heart Replicas

MIT engineers have developed a method of 3D printing a soft, flexible, controllable replica of a patient’s heart that can mimic its opposite’s blood-pumping ability. The goal is to be able to tailor treatments to a patient’s specific heart form and function to home in on the best implant for an individual.

“All hearts are different,” says Luca Rosalia  , a graduate student in the MIT-Harvard Program in Health Sciences and Technology. “There are massive variations, especially when patients are sick. The advantage of our system is that we can recreate not just the form of a patient’s heart, but also its function in both physiology and disease.”

Topics:
3D Printing & Additive Manufacturing Medical

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 NARRATOR: The size and shape of the human heart can vary from one person to the next. And for people living with heart disease, these differences can be particularly pronounced. A team of MIT engineers are hoping to help doctors tailor treatments to a patient's specific heart form and function with a new, soft, custom robotic heart. The team has developed a robotic system to control soft 3D printed replicas of a patient's

    00:00:26 heart that can be actuated to mimic the patient's blood pumping ability. The procedure involves first converting medical images of a patient's heart into a three dimensional computer model, which the researchers can then 3D print using a soft, polymer-based ink. The result is a soft, flexible shell in the exact shape of the patient's own heart. To mimic the heart's pumping action and the motion of the aortic valve in disease, the team

    00:00:53 has fabricated sleeves similar to blood pressure cuffs that wrap around a printed heart and aorta. They tailored each sleeve's pockets such that when wrapped around their respective forms and connected to a small air pumping system, the sleeves could be tuned separately to realistically contract and constrict the printed models. By using patient-specific data, the researchers are able to accurately recreate the same heart-pumping pressures and flows that were previously

    00:01:23 measured in a specific patient. Doctors commonly treat heart diseases such as aortic stenosis, for example, by surgically implanting a synthetic valve designed to widen the aorta's natural valve in the patient's heart. This new system, developed at MIT, would allow doctors to first print a patient's heart and aorta then implant a variety of valves into the printed model to see which design results in the best function and fit

    00:01:50 for that particular patient informing specific surgical decisions and procedures. In the future, the researchers say these heart replicas could also be used by research labs and medical device industry as realistic platforms for testing therapies for various types of heart disease.