The Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, Michigan has long been a pioneer in the use of 3D Printing and 3D visualization to help their patients. One such application of the technology has been with their innovations in Transcatheter Mitral Valve Replacement (TMVR). Mitral Valve Treatment or is one of the most common heart conditions in the West. The standard of care is an extremely invasive open-heart surgery, which is not an option for a number of patients because the risk is simply too high. To avoid such an invasive surgery, the development of a treatment where a device is inserted through one of the patient’s blood vessels to replace the mitral valve would be a life-saving solution for a lot of patients. Specific devices for Transcatheter Mitral Valve Replacement (TMVR) are however not available on the market at this moment, as they are still under development. Clinicians at Henry Ford creatively used a transcatheter aortic device instead, to help a subset of their patients with mitral valve regurgitation.
With this procedure, the biggest challenge is predicting how much the device will obstruct the blood flowing out of the heart towards the rest of the body. For this, some sophisticated planning in 3D is necessary. At Henry Ford, clinicians have successfully planned this type of treatment with the help of the Materialise Mimics Innovation Suite. They combined complex anatomical planning on hollow virtual models and used 3D printed models to simulate the procedure.
We would like to congratulate the team at Henry Ford for their continuous efforts to help these patients!
Interested in finding out more? You can take a look at the original article on PubMed, or read more about transcatheter mitral valve procedures on our previous blog post!
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