Stories about: 3-D printing

3-D printed hearts of hope

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Jason Ayres with son Patrick, Dr. Emani, and Patrick’s 3-D printed heart

Jason Ayres, a family doctor in Alabama, was speechless as he held his adopted son Patrick’s heart in his hands. Well, a replica of his son’s heart — an exact replica, 3-D printed before the 3-year-old boy had lifesaving open-heart surgery.

Patrick was one of the first beneficiaries of 3-D printing technology at Boston Children’s Hospital, which last year helped open a new frontier in pediatric cardiac surgery. Patrick was born with numerous cardiac problems; in addition to double outlet right ventricle and a complete atrioventricular canal defect, his heart lay backwards in his chest.

“We knew early on that he’d need complex surgery to survive,” says Jason.

Finely detailed models of Patrick’s heart created by the Simulator Program at Boston Children’s gave surgeon Sitaram Emani, MD, at the Boston Children’s Heart Center an up-close-and-personal look at his complex cardiac anatomy. …

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A banquet of tools for health tech innovators

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Tools-Shutterstock-donatas1205-croppedWant to hack something in medicine? Vendors are increasingly eager to contribute their tools to problem-solving teams, like those who will gather November 14 for Boston Children’s Hospital’s Hacking Pediatrics. Seeing an array of tools presented at a showcase at Boston Children’s last week, I felt excited about the possibilities ahead.

Here are a few tools that can help innovators improve health care for patients, caregivers and providers. …

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Surgical 3-D printing: 300 prints, 16 specialties and counting

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3-D printing is rapidly becoming a part of surgical planning. Since July 2013, Boston Children’s Hospital’s 3-D printing service, part of the Simulator Program, has received about 200 requests from 16 departments around the hospital. It’s generated a total of about 300 prints, most of them replicating parts of the body to be operated on.

Most prints take between 4 and 28 hours to produce. The largest to date—an entire malformed rib cage—took 105 hours and 35 minutes to create and weighed 8.9 pounds. The smallest—a tiny tangle of blood vessels in the brain—took 4 hours and 21 minutes and weighed 1.34 ounces. Here is sampling of what’s been coming off the production line. …

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