Surgeons in Australia say they have performed the first heart transplant using a “dead heart”.
Donor hearts from adults usually come from people who are confirmed as brain dead but with a heart still beating.
A prosthetic human heart which is “as close as you can get” to the real organ has been made using a new 3D printing technique, Nottingham university said.
The heart’s creator, Richard Arm, said the silicone gel model mimics not only the texture of a real heart, but its inner workings and structure.
The Medicrea group, a company that specializes in the development of innovative surgical technologies for the treatment of complex spinal pathologies, today announced that a surgeon in Lyon, France has performed the world’s first spinal fusion surgery using customized spine cages created with a 3-D printer.
The human mechanism is capable of some amazing functions, but this one boggles the mind. Researchers are saying they’ve developed 3D printed iron–manganese structures for use as bone scaffold material and it actually biodegrades inside the body when their work is done.
It’s the greatest fear of them all, for the wives and family members of construction workers, police officers, firemen, and military servicemen. Each year, thousands of blue collar workers are severely hurt, and many times killed in work related accidents. These accidents occur at random and oftentimes there is no one at fault.
Bradley White, 16, was suffering from an irregular heartbeat. The medical staff at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital was proceeding cautiously as they knew the problem was being caused by a tumor on his heart. Doctors found the tumor when Bradley was three. Having enduring a childhood rife with surgeries (several open-heart) and the insertion of a defibrillator implanted to protect him from sudden cardiac death as a young child, obviously there was more than enough reason to take extra precautions.
One area which has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of 3D printing, has been that of low cost prosthetic devices. For the most part, these devices have been primarily prosthetic hands, thanks in part to organizations such as E-nabling The Future, who offer free designs for such devices.
If you’ve ever bought a wedding dress, or know someone who has, you learn quickly that it is difficult to purchase something that fits perfectly right off the rack. Instead, a series of alterations are generally required in order to match body to garment. Now, imagine you were buying new knees and were required to be satisfied with what was available “off the rack.” This is the situation in which people have found themselves in the past. While replacement knees do come in different sizes, just as with the wedding dress, there is a difference between a general size category and a perfect fit.
In a South African hospital, two patients had surgery to replace their mandibles with titanium implants created with 3D printing technology after they lost portions of their faces due to cancer and ancillary diseases.
Bioengineers have been steadily advancing toward the goal of building lab-grown organs out of a patient’s own cells, but a few major challenges remain. One of them is making vasculature, the blood vessel plumbing system that delivers nutrients and remove waste from the cells on the inside of a mass of tissue. Without these blood vessels, interior cells quickly suffocate and die.
The BIOFABRIS is a National Institute of S&T in Biomanufacturing of multidisciplinary,
located at the Chemical Engineering Campus of UNICAMP, character that aims to integrate computational tools, synthesis and development of new biomaterials and application of engineering techniques to obtain biomedical devices (prostheses and orthopedic orthoses) and substitutes for live biological tissues or defective or missing human organs.