3D Heart Model Assists Surgeons in Saving a Life
This video starts with a surgeon showing a young mother how her son's heart was working prior to surgery and what is happening now that he has had this life-saving surgical procedure on a small screen. Then the Manager of the RPC explains a typical project for additive manufacturing compared to the significance of this heart model project. There's brief video showing how the Makerbot equipment actually builds a model of the child's heart based on the Radiologist's scan from a flexible plastic material, building it layer by layer. The Radiologist is interviewed about receiving the model. The Pediatric Cardiologist shows a screen where a typical image is displayed to see what is happening in the heart and how they anticipate what surgery might need to be done. Then he describes how helpful having an actual model to hold, based on the scan, has been. The Manager of RPC describes how lower costs of the technology is helping broaden the application of additive manufacturing while a video is shown of the machine continuing to layer the plastics to build a heart model. A photo of the Makerbot equipment is shown. The Makerbot is basically a black box 18"x14"x14" with a large window to observe the build. There are spools of plastic resin mounted on the back which feed into the machine to build the model as it moves back and forth adhering one layer to another.