Juliet Osazemwinde
Utility of a super-flexible three-dimensional printed heart model in congenital heart surgery (Free)
The objective of this study was to assess the utility of 3D printed heart models of congenital heart disease for preoperative surgical simulation.
Twenty patient-specific 3D models were created between March 2015 and August 2017. All operations were performed by a young consultant surgeon who had no prior experience with complex biventricular repair. All 15 patients with balanced ventricles had outflow tract malformations (double-outlet right ventricle in 7 patients, congenitally corrected transposition of great arteries in 5, transposition of great arteries in 1, interrupted aortic arch Type B in 1, tetralogy of Fallot with pulmonary atresia and major aortopulmonary collateral arteries in 1). One patient had hypoplastic left heart complex, and the remaining 4 patients had a functional single ventricle. The median age at operation was 1.4 (range 0.1–5.9) years. Based on a multislice computed tomography data set, the 3D models were made of polyurethane resins using stereolithography as the printing technology and vacuum casting as the manufacturing method.
