ISM Weekly Report 3

This week in ISM, we submitted our 3rd research assessment on our topic of choice. With my topic being Cardiothoracic Surgery I decided to build upon my previous research assessments and zero in on specific aspects of my field. This week I choose to research and educate myself further on the use of 3D printing in cardiac surgery. The article I used is titled is called “Scan, plan, print, practice, perform: Development and use of a patient-specific 3-dimensional printed model in adult cardiac surgery”; it is an academic research article conducted in collaboration with Joshua L. Hermsen, MD, Thomas M. Burke, Ph.D., Stephen P. Seslar, MD, Ph.D., David S. Owens, MD, Beth A. Ripley, MD, Ph.D., Nahush A. Mokadam, MD, and lastly Edward D. Verrier, MD. This very well written and researched article educated me on a few interesting facts about the use of 3D printing in Cardiothoracic Surgery. The first thing I learned is the fact that 3D printing is almost exclusively used to make mock hearts of specific patients before surgeries. This is done so that surgeons can have the opportunity to perform the difficult surgeries before operating on the actual patients. Due to this, the actual rate of success for these surgeries has increased drastically. Not only this but the recovery of the actual patients have also become a lot easier. Moreover, with the increased experiences surgeons are getting with the 3D printed technology, the future of eventually using 3D printed parts to replace real human organs or parts of organs are becoming more of a reality. With a better understanding of the contributions 3D printing, I am very excited to be able to discover something new about the field of Cardiothoracic Surgery with my next research assessment.