Engineers at MIT have developed a 3D-printed robotic heart that could aid doctors in tailoring treatments to individual patients. To make the device, researchers first convert medical images of a patient’s heart into a 3D computer model, then 3D-printed with polymer-based ink to produce a soft, flexible shell shaped like the patient’s heart. The team can use this method to print a patient’s aorta. The researchers have also developed sleeves that wrap around the printed heart and aorta and can be controlled to mimic the patient’s blood-pumping ability.
Researchers could accurately match heart-pumping pressures and flows previously recorded for each patient in their respective printed hearts to test whether the custom robotic heart worked. The device could create a printed heart and aorta model, allowing doctors to implant various valve designs to determine which design provides the best function and fit for that patient. The models could also be used to test therapies for different types of heart disease.
The researchers created custom replicas of actual patients’ hearts using medical scans from 15 patients with aortic stenosis. The researchers demonstrated that each model heart could accurately recreate the same heart-pumping pressures and flows that had previously been measured in each patient. The valves were implanted in the printed aortas modeled after each patient to see if the printed heart and vessel responded similarly.
According to Luca Rosalia, a graduate student in the MIT-Harvard Program in Health Sciences and Technology, all hearts are unique. “The advantage of our system is that we can recreate not just the form of a patient’s heart but also its function in both physiology and disease,” Rosalia explained.
The study was recently published in the journal Science Robotics.
References
- Chu, J. (2023, February 22). Custom, 3D-printed heart replicas look and pump just like the real thing. MIT News; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://news.mit.edu/2023/custom-3d-printed-heart-replicas-patient-specific-0222
- Rosalia, L., Ozturk, C., Goswami, D., Bonnemain, J., Wang, S. X., Bonner, B., Weaver, J. C., Puri, R., Kapadia, S., Nguyen, C. T., & Roche, E. T. (2023). Soft robotic patient-specific hydrodynamic model of aortic stenosis and ventricular remodeling. Science Robotics, 8(75), eade2184. https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.ade2184
