The night before operating on 2-year-old Myla Kramer, her surgeon held a copy of her heart, produced on a 3-D printer, in his hands.
Dr. Mark Plunkett studied it, trying to determine how to patch the many Swiss-cheeselike holes in the bottom of her heart — a potentially life-threatening condition. The next day, he knew exactly what to do.
The surgery was a success. Myla, of Coal City, Ill., is now a thriving 4-year-old, attending preschool, acting silly and insisting as many kids her age do, that she can do everything herself. Her mother calls her recovery a miracle.
“If you saw her, you’d think nothing ever happened to this child,” said her mom, Heather Kramer.
Plunkett, a doctor at Children’s Hospital of Illinois in Peoria, said the surgery helped Myla, who was born with a heart defect, turn a corner. Without the 3-D printed heart, “There was a significant possibility that I would get in there, try to patch over this area, and not necessarily get all of the holes.”
Though the practice still isn’t widespread, some doctors and hospitals are printing 3-D models of patients’ hearts to help prepare for operations. With use of 3-D printed heart models expected to grow, Illinois hospital system OSF HealthCare and the federal National Institutes of Health hope to partner with the American Heart Association to improve the quality of printed hearts, with the goal of helping more patients. OSF has 10 hospitals in Illinois, all outside the Chicago area, including OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria and OSF Saint Anthony Medical Center in Rockford.
The groups want to create an online database of 3-D printed hearts from patients with congenital heart defects, reviewed by experts in the field. The idea is to help standardize the process of printing hearts.
Congenital heart defects are problems with the structure of the heart at birth. They’re the most common type of birth defect, affecting eight out of every 1,000 newborns, according to the National Institutes of Health’s National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute. Some defects are easy to fix and others, such as Myla’s, require multiple surgeries.
The printed hearts can help doctors in tricky cases such as Myla’s, doctors say. They also can help parents like Kramer, who found it reassuring to see the 3-D heart before Myla’s surgery, and hear the surgeon explain his plan.
“That understanding, that’s a precious thing for a family that’s getting ready to go through surgery on their child,” said Dr. Matthew Bramlet, a pediatric cardiologist at the Children’s Hospital of Illinois.
At OSF HealthCare’s Jump Trading Simulation & Education Center in Peoria, which printed Myla’s heart, engineers typically take an MRI or CT scan of a patient’s heart and run the scan through computer programs that allow them to print plaster composite hearts in three dimensions, Bramlet said.
He said the process takes about two days at Jump, a research, development and education arm of the hospital system that’s a collaboration between OSF and the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Peoria. Bramlet also serves as Jump’s director of advanced imaging and modeling.
An outside company might charge about $3,000 for the process, but Jump prints hearts at no cost to patients, funding the practice through its endowment. Other hospitals also generally don’t charge patients, instead turning to other funding. Right now, insurers usually don’t cover it either.
The 3-D printers themselves vary in cost. Jump’s printer cost about $80,000, Bramlet said.
Other hospitals are making the most of the 3-D printing technology too. Lurie Children’s Hospital in Chicago occasionally uses 3-D printed hearts to prepare for patient surgeries and Children’s National Health System in Washington, D.C., prints about one or two hearts a month. The University of Washington Medical Center has also printed hearts.
An online database of 3-D printed hearts reviewed by experts would promote the use of high-quality models as more doctors and hospitals turn to them, said Dr. Clyde Yancy, chief of cardiology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and chairman of the American Heart Association’s Chicago Heart Innovation Forum. The National Institutes of Health already has such a database, but the hearts in it have not all undergone a rigorous review by experts.
“This is so we don’t end up with so much variation from one model to the next,” Yancy said. “We can avoid making decisions based on models that are not as accurate.”
Practitioners, medical students and others would be able to download the models at no charge and print them or view them in 3-D using virtual reality tools.
Myla’s mother called the use of a 3-D printed heart “a huge technological advancement” for her daughter.
Though the patching of her heart was successful, Myla has had a difficult road to wellness. She suffered serious complications that kept her in the hospital for about 100 days, and she’s not done with surgeries yet. She has three artificial heart valves that will need to be replaced as her heart grows.
But Kramer hopes her youngest daughter won’t need any additional surgeries for some time. She’s now an independent little girl who jumps and claps every time she sees the bus, excited to spend time with her friends at school.
“Even with everything she’s gone through, she loves life and loves to play,” Kramer said. “She’s overcome a lot.”
Twitter @lschencker
