3D Printing with Nicklaus Children’s Hospital
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CASE STUDY 3D Printing with Nicklaus Children’s Hospital “Our new engineer segmented it. He hit the “go” button on Simpleware AS Cardio and then added the base and supports. It is very quick.” Thanks to: Highlights • The Cardiovascular Surgery APL team at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital uses 3D anatomical printing with Synopsys Simpleware software in their regular workflows • Simpleware AI-enabled tools help create models rapidly and with great precision • High-quality 3D anatomical models are printed on a Stratasys J750 Digital Anatomy printer Thomas Haglund, Biomedical Engineer with the Cardiovascular Surgery Advanced Projects Laboratory at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital Overview 3D anatomical printing offers many benefits to clinicians, including enhancing visualization and measurement of pathologies to support planning of both standard and complex surgeries, while also incorporating medical devices, when applicable. The Cardiovascular Surgery Advanced Projects Laboratory (APL) at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital is using a range of technologies, including holomedicine 3D visualization and 3D printing to help enhance surgical planning and the patient experience. One of the first institutions in the United States to apply 3D printing technologies for surgical planning and education, Nicklaus Children’s Cardiovascular Surgery APL has printed more than 500 models of hearts, brains, spines, extremities and other organs. Nicklaus’ Robert Hannan, MD, Thomas Haglund and Muhanad Shraiteh collaborated with the Synopsys Simpleware Product Group to develop solutions for converting patient imaging data into models suitable for Stratasys 3D printers. The resulting 3D anatomical models help clinicians plan pediatric cardiac surgeries. In the example highlighted in this case study, the Cardiovascular Surgery APL team employed Simpleware software’s powerful Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to help speed up the workflow of creating a heart model for a teenage patient.

Patient-Specific Challenges The team at Nicklaus Children’s needed to plan a complex operation for a teenage patient with an anomalous origin of the left coronary artery from the right sinus of Valsavla with intramural, interarterial course. Due to the complex nature of the pathology, it was decided that a 3D CT scan (DICOM format) of the patient’s heart was necessary, and that a 3D printed model would help the surgical team visualize the pathways of the heart to plan for the surgery. Therefore, Simpleware ScanIP Medical software was used to convert the DICOM image data into a 3D...

3D Anatomical Printing with Stratasys Printers A1 Lateral View (A1) and Transverse View (B1) of the 3D print-ready model in Simpleware software, and resulting 3D printed anatomical model from Stratasys J750 Digital Anatomy printer (A2, B2) with the pathology encircled in orange. The segmented image data was 3D printed using a Stratasys J750 Digital Anatomy 3D printer, incorporating different colors to help clinicians better visualize individual regions of the heart. Recently, a Stratasys J5 MediJet printer was installed in the Cardiovascular Surgery APL, which can also be used to print 3D...