3D printer device set to transform heart treatment

Doctors at the School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis, have used a 3D printer to create a device which could revolutionise treatment and monitoring of cardiac conditions.

Led by Igor Efimov, PhD, the team has created a 3-D elastic membrane made of a soft, flexible, silicon material that is precisely shaped to match the heart’s epicardium, or the outer layer of the wall of the heart. Current technology is two-dimensional and cannot cover the full surface of the epicardium or maintain reliable contact for continual use without sutures or adhesives.

Tiny sensors can be then printed onto the membrane which can be used to monitor a number of important heart health data points, including temperature and strain. The device is also able to send out small electrical pulses to correct arrythmias.

The findings have been recorded in Nature Communications. According to Efimov: "Each heart is a different shape, and current devices are one-size-fits-all and don’t at all conform to the geometry of a patient’s heart. With this application, we image the patient’s heart through MRI or CT scan, then computationally extract the image to build a 3D model that we can print on a 3D printer."

Photo courtesy of James Byard, WUSTL photos