Survivor turns pioneer for 3D heart surgery

A 19-year-old first year student of BSc Electronics in Kerala, who was the first to undergo a heart surgery with the use of 3D Printing Technology at Amrita Institute of MedicalSciences, Kochi, is now working towards improving the technology, by helping the team at Amrita Institute to develop a Virtual 3D Visualisation.

Thanks to the technology, cardiac surgery duration has been reduced by 30 per cent.

In 2015, Hari Krishnan’s family realised he needed heart surgery owing to various complexities. However, many hospitals denied him treatment.

Doctors at the Amrita Institute used the 3D printing technology that they had just launched to treat him, completely unaware that he had a great interest in the technology, and had, only three months prior to his surgery, built a 3D printer at his house in a small town near Kollam.

“He was a patient with Situs inversus (all organs reversed in their position), dextrocardia (heart on the right instead of left), ‘double outlet right ventricle’ (both the main arteries arising from the one ventricle - normally the artery for pure blood and that for impure blood would arise from two separate ventricles) and pulmonary stenosis (valve of the artery that carries impure blood to lungs for purification was blocked). Without the help of the technology, the operation wouldn’t have been successful,” said Dr K Mahesh, Clinical Professor, Department of Paediatric Cardiology, at the Institute.

Holographic tech next big thing

Emerging successfully from a highly complex surgical procedure, Hari Krishnan’s passion for 3D printing was fired up further when he understood, first hand, the miracles that the integration of medicine and technology can offer.

Enthused by the progress, doctors are looking at using 3D printing for creating implants, though these are early days for the concept. “Although this is the obvious next step, we need the right material [for creating the implants to be used in surgeries]. Only then can we print out the patient-specific implant,” said Dr Mahesh, clinical professor, department of Paediatric Cardiology, at the Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi.

Next is the dream to take technology integration to the next stage, where the doctors get to the see the image of the internal organ on a holographic projector. “The 3D printing technology gives you an exact copy of the person’s heart printed from a CT scan or MRI that they could hold in hand, and observe and understand before the patient’s chest is cut open for the surgery. The holographic technology, on the other hand, enables the doctors to see the image on a projector. In this, we will create the image using light instead of creating a physical model,” Hari Krishnan explained.