Specialists at Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust are using 3D imaging and printing to create exact replicas of patients’ hearts to help them plan and carry out surgery.
The technique requires specialist cardiovascular magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging, which uses powerful magnets and radio waves to take detailed pictures of the heart.
Every CMR scan produces hundreds of images that are stored and displayed using advanced computer software, to create an exact three-dimensional digital replica of the human heart. This means experts can view the heart’s structure, including the muscles, chambers and valves, in a particularly lifelike way, to assess how well the heart is pumping and quickly diagnose a variety of problems, including:
- congenital heart disease
- wear and tear of heart valves
- any other damage to the heart.
Now experts at the Trust are going one step further and using 3D printing to turn the digital replica into an actual exact model of a patient’s heart.
How is 3D imaging and printing used?
Dr Sonya Babu-Narayan, honorary consultant cardiologist and British Heart Foundation Imperial College clinical senior lecturer, is interested in the role of CMR in preventing and treating heart rhythm disturbances in patients born with congenital heart disease, as well as using 3D imaging during invasive heart procedures.
She says: “The availability of 3D modelling when preparing for and performing heart surgery or other cardiac procedures allows two really important things to happen.
“Firstly, surgeons and other clinical team members are able to better grasp how a patient’s heart is affected by their condition. This leads to better care and allows us to diagnose and repair conditions with less need for invasive diagnostic procedures.
“Secondly, a 3D model can be a huge help with the communication between the clinical team and the patient. A 3D visual representation of the heart is so much clearer than anything we could put in to words.
“We can even go one step further and get the model 3D printed. Seeing and handling an actual model of their heart can be so much more informative than two dimensional drawings or other images.
Another advantage of printing a 3D model of the human heart is the opportunity to improve training. Heart disease comes in many different forms and the more cardiologists can learn about the structure of hearts with these problems, the better they will be able to treat them.
Ground-breaking innovation: scarring of the heart
The 3D programme at Royal Brompton, supported by biomedical engineers Materialise, has also done something that no other hospital in the world has done, which is to print hearts that also show regions of scarring.
Scarring, often caused by heart disease or surgery, is one of the reasons that patients may have life -threatening arrhythmia, a condition where the heart is beating too fast, slow or irregularly.
At Royal Brompton Hospital, using 3D modelling, consultants and surgeons can gain a better understanding of what kind of scarring causes different types of arrhythmia.
This research is invaluable for improving treatments for patients with arrhythmias in the future. The aim is to prevent patients from requiring a defibrillator as a precaution and to only implant the lifesaving device when it is certain they need one.