UCLA doctors use 3-D printed model to guide tricky heart valve replacement

​​Last summer, after a long career as a successful entrepreneur and a brief retirement, Richard Whitaker was helping to start another new company. Unfortunately, a serious health concern caused a couple of interruptions in his work on the new venture. One of Whitaker’s heart valves wasn’t working properly, which caused congestive heart failure and led to two hospitalizations within several months.  Whitaker, now 66, needed surgery to replace the valve, which regulates the blood being pumped from the heart to the lungs. But previous surgeries and the unique anatomy of his heart would have made conventional open-heart surgery too risky. UCLA cardiologists decided to use a less invasive approach to replace the valve. Given the unique structure of Whitaker’s heart, the team took the added steps of printing a 3-D model of his heart that could be used for practice before the actual procedure. The key question they needed to answer was whether a replacement valve would align and fit with Whitaker’s unusually large pulmonary arteries. “We are harnessing the latest technologies such as 3-D printing to help us better address the most complicated cases,” said Dr. Jamil Aboulhosn, director of the Ahmanson/UCLA Adult Congenital Heart Disease Center and the Streisand/American Heart Association Endowed Chair in the Division of Cardiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.  The 3-D model, which was created using a CT scan of Whitaker’s heart, was made of a si...
Source: UCLA Newsroom: Health Sciences - Category: Universities & Medical Training Source Type: news