Rib cage simulator created with 3D printing, this is how young heart surgeons are trained

A portable rib cage simulator, made with 3D printing, in which the heart is positioned to simulate cardiac surgery. It is the device for the training of the cardiac surgeons of tomorrow created by the team led by Vladimiro Vida of the University Hospital of Padua, who designed and built it with Formlabs technology. The Padua-based company – a note recalls – is an avant-garde center in cardiac surgery, ever since the first heart transplant in Italy was performed there in 1985. “3D printing is allowing us to radically change the way we train the heart surgeons of tomorrow and we are convinced that this technology will be the future. Our dream is to create an Italian training network in which to have various training centers connected in simultaneous, in each of which students can experiment directly on their model and on their simulator the intervention to be carried out “, explains Vida, head of the UOC of Pediatric Cardiac Surgery of the Aou of Padua.” Formlabs – adds Marco Zappia, Channel Sales Company Manager for Italy – was born with the aim of extending access to 3D printing as much as possible and the applications that we are seeing born all over the world in recent years in the medical field continue to amaze us. technology can be of great help for research and progress in care and have been chosen by an important and cutting-edge institution such as the Aou Pad ova can only make us proud and confirm the importance of following this path, continuing to expand our offer of solutions and materials “. Training doctors on pediatric cardiac surgery is very difficult – underline the Aou Padovana – due to the complexities the pathologies and frailties of children suffering from these diseases. Historically, autopsy hearts or pig hearts are used. However, a laboratory based on this type of organ poses many limits, both for the difficulty in finding pig hearts, storing them and preparing them for training, and for the characteristics of the organs themselves, which are larger than the heart of a child. and they are also healthy hearts in which it is very difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce the pathologies of the organs that will then have to be operated on. For this reason, the team led by Vida decided to turn to 3D printing, creating a printing laboratory within the hospital. The choice fell on Formlabs Form 3L SLA stereolithographic technology printers, which combine printing precision – it reads – with ease of use and low costs. or part of it the most deficient aspect in the formation is the reproduction of the position of the heart inside the rib cage. Placing the printed organ on a table, leaving the trainee the possibility to move freely around it, is in fact very different from the conditions in which it will be found in real life. For this reason the team decided to design and 3D print a simulator of the rib cage, transportable and modular, with parts that can be changed according to training needs and easily reprinted. These features also allow you to experiment with different approaches to the operation: from the most traditional to the most innovative and less invasive. – continues the note – it is now used for theoretical-practical training courses every month for doctors in training at the University of Padua. This resulted in significant cost savings compared to courses with animal hearts and significantly less logistical complexity. Not only that: the team has exported its simulator and its skills to other Italian locations. For a training course at the International School of Cardiac Surgery in Erice, for example, 50 hearts with the characteristics of a congenital heart disease were printed with the resin of Formlabs Elastic 50A, each for each participant who will thus be able to fully reproduce the intervention on his own model. An impossible possibility in traditional workshops with animal hearts. The process of printing and post-processing the 50 hearts took about 140 hours in all, but the most complex part is the creation of the basic model, which takes about another 50 hours to obtain a model with the exact anatomical characteristics.