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The surgery that he had helped to fix the hole in his heart. Now, the-because the hole
is closed, that blood doesn't go back and forth. A lot of times we're working on relatively
inanimate objects, you know parts that are you know gonna go on to an appliance or a
car or something like that and while they're neat, they just don't have the same, you know,
sort of human aspect that makes it a lot of fun to work on this. In this case, I got a
call from Norton's about asking if we could possibly build a heart model. One of their
radiologists had toured our center last year and had a particularly difficult surgery that
they were going to perform and wanted to see if we could build this model. And so he had
taken the CTMRI data and constructed a heart model and split it into three separate pieces
for me, sent me that information, and then I used one of our 3D printers that we have
here and, in particular, they wanted a material that is similar to heart tissue that has sort
of the same feel or look to it. They did the modeling and the post processing and they
sent Tim Gornet the file and I did not really watch or I did not see the model being printed,
so I showed up at his office and he had this beautiful model and it was sort of a "eureka!"
moment. And I knew Dr. Austin would be pretty excited when he saw that because it was a
very accurate reproduction. This issue for patients who have this abnormality, and it's
relatively rare, this double allied right ventricle, is how is it going to be repaired?
Sometimes the surgeon has to guess at which is the best operation. Now we have good imaging
techniques. The most common one is using Ultrasound or Echo-it's called Echo Cardiology, where
we get ultrasonic images of the heart, but we're basically taking slices of the heart
or images that we have to make decisions from. And sometimes we misinterpret exactly what
we're going to find when we're actually looking at the heart right in front of us. And so
I've always thought it would be valuable to me to have an image, actually something I
could hold in my hand and look at before I actually did the surgery so I can plan the
operation. We were one of the first universities in the world to have 3D printing and that
was back in 1993. What's really happened now was the applications are expanding as these
machines become lower cost, it's opening up new doors for people to be able to utilize
this, the materials are also dropping in cost as well. So, something that used to cost thousands
and thousands of dollars and maybe take weeks of time, now it's costing hundreds of dollars
on a machine that's $2500 and it's completed in several days.