Every city has its points of pride, and, when you’re a Rust Belt town with a rough history, those points of pride become huge. I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio and its surrounding areas, and I’ve watched the city evolve from the “mistake on the lake” to one of the country’s top cities for arts and entertainment, food and drink, and medicine. The Cleveland Clinic attracts patients from around the world, patients who, without the world-class doctors and highly specialized, advanced medical technology the Clinic offers, would have little or no hope. The hospital, which was just ranked as the 5th top hospital in the country, is best known for its cardiology department, but it also has the distinction of having creating the first 3D printed liver.
Currently, 3D printing models of patients’ organs is becoming a pretty common and easy practice that is being used in an increasing variety of surgeries. At the time, however, it was still very experimental and required a lot of testing.
“We went through a process for every patient who underwent liver surgery where we resected a portion of the liver, took it out, [and] prior to surgery, we prepared a 3D printed version of it,” said Dr. Zein.
Having perfected the method of 3D liver modeling, the clinic was able to offer hope to a patient with a liver tumor who had already been turned down by other hospitals. Dr. Zein is thrilled with the possibilities that 3D printing offers for saving lives that could not have been saved before.
“My career has been as a clinical investigator so medical research and investigation is part of my life and it’s probably the most exciting part of my life,” he said. “So I’m very proud of what we did. What comes out of it, in the end, I’m not sure, but I have a feeling that there will be a role for these technologies, 3D printing, in complex surgeries.”