Surgeons use 3D printed models to plan complex heart surgeries
Pediatric cardiologist Piers Barker, MD, never forgets a heart, and especially not a rare one. That’s why he was taken aback when flipping through cardiac images for a new six-year-old patient he was scheduled to see at Duke Children’s Hospital in 2006. He was sure that he had seen the heart before, but he didn’t recognize the patient’s name.
It turns out that he had seen the heart of Josie Dunnigan before, when he was a pediatric cardiology fellow at the University of Michigan helping care for an infant who had just undergone a very complex heart surgery.