If you were looking for a poster child to be the image of the dramatic and powerful impact that 3D printing is having on quality of life, you wouldn’t need to look any further than the smiling face of five-year-old Mia Gonzalez.
Dr. Redmond Burke, the Director of Cardiovascular Surgery at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, explained the vital nature of such a physical model to the successful resolution of a surgical intervention on a child’s heart:
“The challenge is a surgical one, how do you divide this double aortic arch and save her life without hurting her. A lot of these babies’ hearts are like Rubik’s cubes, and you can’t give somebody a piece of paper with a picture of a Rubik’s cube on it and say ‘how do you solve this?’ You have to hold that object in your hands and then come up with a solution.”
And that’s exactly what they did. The 3D printed model of Mia’s heart allowed them to have multiple opportunities over a period of time to study the specific anatomy of her particular heart and develop the best possible plan for intervention.
“Going from four-and-a-half years of not knowing to, all of a sudden, in less than a two month time frame, she’s back – out of her surgery and back to normal. So, you know, that has been a great experience for us. She’s very active, she loves dancing, she loves baseball. She likes doing everything. So now she’s going back to a normal life and not being worried.”
That kind of contribution is priceless and Stratasys is working to make it part of what happens all the time. The introduction of 3D imagine and 3D modeling into surgery is, without a doubt, one of the greatest advancements since the introduction of anesthetic. It truly takes the medical team forward out of the darkness and uncertainty towards the best possible solution for any individual need. Discuss this story in the 3D Printed Heart Forum thread on 3DPB.com.