Hi, my name is Redmond Burke, I’m the chief of pediatric heart surgery at Nicklaus children’s hospital. I’m here today to show how we plan complex congenital heart operations. so this is a three-dimensional model; it’s been created using the stratasys j750 system. This is the new digital anatomy upgrade that allows them to give us cuttable heart models. you can have a cuttable bone, cuttable cardiac tissue, cuttable brain tissue and for this child we’re re-operating for the third time. the baby’s got a very complex heart and we knew that to plan his operation would be essential to be able to actually cut the model and so we’ve been able to open up the right ventricular alpha tract on this child and then have a very clear vision of what we’re going to see in the operating room.
when we try to resect the complex area underneath the aortic valve so with the simple operative instruments i can actually cut this just as i would cut the patient’s right ventricle during the operation. Then the three-dimensional anatomy allows me to see whether or not we’re going to actually be able to perform the operation the way we intend to. This is a big advance over hard models that could not be cut could not be manipulated the way human tissue can. so having a model that actually has the same structural feel of human tissue is a significant advance. We believe this technology given to us by stratasys will allow us to reduce the trauma of patients undergoing complex heart surgery. We believe these cuttable models will allow us to perform faster, gentler operations and would be a significant aid in teaching young surgeons how to perform these operations. This would be an invaluable teaching tool. being able to actually cut the three-dimensional model before you go into the operating room for the first time in your life.