Communications of the ACM
3D-Printed Heart Replicas Look, Pump Like the Real Thing
MIT engineers are hoping to help doctors tailor treatments to patients’ specific heart form and function, with a custom robotic heart.
Credit: Melanie Gonick/MIT
Physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) led a team that developed a procedure to enable the creation of three-dimensionally (3D) printed replicas of patients’ hearts.
After converting medical images of a patient's heart into a 3D computer model, the researchers used a polymer-based ink to 3D-print a flexible shell identical to the patient's heart.
The researchers developed sleeves that may be wrapped around a 3D-printed heart and aorta to replicate a patient's blood-pumping ability.
Said graduate student Luca Rosalia, "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."
From MIT News
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