WBUR February 22, 2023
A researcher holds a customized, 3D-printed heart made to mimic the shape and behavior of a patient’s heart. (Melanie Gonick/MIT)
Engineers can now print three-dimensional replicas of a human heart custom-designed to look and act like an individual patient’s heart.
The goal is to provide realistic models so that doctors, researchers and medical device manufacturers can use them in testing therapies for different types of heart disease, said Ellen Roche, a mechanical engineering professor at MIT whose lab helped develop these heart replicas.
“In patients with heart failure, they have very different anatomy,” she said. Each heart is unique, and there’s even more variation for patients with heart failure.
The process of creating a customized, replica starts with taking detailed...
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