3-D models give surgeons an edge before they begin
BERNICE Belcher couldn’t get out of bed.
It wasn’t that she was tired she’d had a good night’s sleep. But every time the 77-year-old from Columbus, Ohio, tried to get up, she became so dizzy she had to lie down again.
That’s how she eventually found herself in consultations with surgeons who told her she needed an artificial heart valve, to be done by open-heart surgery. They had abandoned the thought of lessinvasive surgery - transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR, because Belcher’s aortic root, where the body’s main artery meets the heart, wasn’t long enough to have an artificial valve implanted using a catheter.
“The next option was to go in,” she says.
Belcher’s surgeons decided on the best way to proceed, thanks to a 3-D model of her aorta. This can take some of the guesswork out of surgery.
Scott Lilly, an interventional cardiologist at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Centre, operated on Belcher. “We talk about patient care and individualising care,” he says. “This is a small but a real and successful example.”
Using CT scans that are manipulated via special software, a team of engineers creates a model fashioned from flexible materials that re-create the texture of the aorta and its surrounding structures. Then the model is loaded into a heart simulator: a box filled with pumps and blood-like fluid.