3D Printer Printed Heart That Saved 4year Old Mia's Life

Mia

Mia Gonzalez spent the first 3½ years of her life missing out. She had to skip day care and dance classes because she constantly had colds and pneumonia. When Mia could go out and play, she was easily winded and took multiple asthma medications to try to help her breathing.

After about 10 hospital stays, doctors realized that Mia had a malformation in her aorta, the vessel that pumps blood from the heart. The 4-year-old would need an operation to close off the part of her aorta that was putting pressure on her windpipe and making it hard to breathe, swallow and get rid of phlegm when she got a cold.

"We freaked out to go from thinking she had asthma to being told she needed to have open heart surgery," said Katherine Gonzalez, Mia's mom.

But Mia's malformation was complicated. The surgeons at Nicklaus Children's Hospital in Miami, where Mia was treated, might have been apprehensive about the procedure were it not for a new technology: the 3-D printer.

3d Printer

Earlier this year, the hospital got a 3-D printer that makes exact replicas of organs that doctors can use to plan surgery, and even do practice operations. The printer uses images from patients' MRI or CT scan images as a template and lays down layers of rubber or plastic.

Dr. Redmond Burke, director of pediatric cardiovascular surgery at Nicklaus Children's Hospital, meditated on the model of Mia's heart for a couple of weeks. He showed it to colleagues for their input and even carried it around in his gym bag for quick reference.

Burke finally had the "Aha!" insight. Instead of making an incision on the left side for this type of heart defect, called double aortic arch, he should cut into Mia's chest from the right. 

"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.

Using the model, "there was no doubt, and surgeons hate doubt," he added.

He attributes the model with saving the team and patient about two hours in the operating room because he was able to have a clearer plan to do the surgery.

Burke and his colleagues have created models for about 25 young patients with congenital heart defects. In the past, they might not even have operated on some of these patients because the surgeries seemed too tricky, but "it's very unlikely I will ever call someone inoperable (now) without holding a model in my hand," Burke said.

About 75 hospitals in the United States, and around 200 worldwide, have a printer such as the one used to make a model of Mia's heart, said Scott Rader, general manager of Stratasys, which sells the printers.

Although 3-D printers have been used clinically for the last 20 or 25 years to make prototypes for surgical tools and other uses, they only started churning out simulated organs in the last few years, Rader said.

Doctors have used the simulated organs to prepare for all kinds of tricky operations, such as surgery to remove a brain tumor or to correct a severe cleft palate, Rader said. Doctors can operate on them with regular surgical tools "again and again and again until you think of the optimal way to do surgery," Rader said.