3D Heart Replica

Uses include individual study, for diagnosis and planning care.

3D-Printed Heart Replicas Look, Pump Like the Real Thing, By MIT News, February 24, 2023

A doctor holds a custom-made robotic heart.

MIT engineers are hoping to help doctors tailor treatments to patients’ specific heart form and function, with a custom robotic heart. Physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) led a team that developed a procedure to enable the creation of three-dimensionally (3D) printed replicas of patients’ hearts.

After converting medical images of a patient's heart into a 3D computer model, the researchers used a polymer-based ink to 3D-print a flexible shell identical to the patient's heart.

The researchers developed sleeves that may be wrapped around a 3D-printed heart and aorta to replicate a patient's blood-pumping ability.  Said graduate student Luca Rosalia, "The advantage of our system is that we can recreate not just the form of a patient's heart, but also its function in both physiology and disease."

From MIT News

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Heart Cells with Electronic Warning Sensors

ACM NEWS

'Pop-Up' Electronic Sensors Could Detect When Heart Cells Misbehave

By University of California San Diego, December 28, 2021

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a tool that monitors the electrical activity inside heart cells using tiny "pop-up" sensors that poke into the cells without damaging them. The device directly measures the movement and speed of electrical signals traveling within a single heart cell as well as between multiple heart cells.

The device could enable scientists to gain more detailed insights into heart disorders and diseases such as arrhythmia, heart attack, and cardiac fibrosis. "This information could be used to help inform clinicians and enable them to make better diagnoses," says senior author Sheng Xu, a professor of nanoengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering.

The work is described in "Three-Dimensional Transistor Arrays for Intra- and Inter-Cellular Recording," published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology.

The device consists of a 3D array of microscopic field effect transistors that are shaped like sharp pointed tips. The tiny FETs pierce through cell membranes without damaging them and are sensitive enough to detect electrical signals directly inside the cells. The FETs are coated in a phospholipid bilayer to evade being seen as a foreign substance.

From University of California San Diego

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