We Printed An Actual Human Heart

It’s real. We 3D printed a heart.

Hold your horses on questions and listen to us for now.

The ultimate goal in medical field  is to 3D print a fully functional heart however, with many technical considerations such as tissue condition, implantation, sustainability and etc, 3D printing technology is still lacking in these areas albeit advancing at a steady pace.

This 3D printed heart in particular belongs to a patient. Our client intended to study his/her heart to understand how the surgery can be done, as well as using the heart model for explanation. As we’ve mentioned on our Facebook and LinkedIn, this is one of the best study materials you can have prior a surgery.

Here is the file source & technology we used:

File Source: Rapid Model Development Sdn Bhd
Technology: Polyjet
Printer:  Objet Design Series – Connex 3
Materials: VeroWhite, VeroCyan, VeroMagenta
Build Time: 11 hours and 52 minutes

Screenshots prior printing:

Outcome:

Implications:

• We used Polyjet (or Connex 3 in particular) in this case as it offers multi-material and multi-color capabilities. This heart model in particular, requires a lot of precision to print out blood arteries as well as rubber-like texture.
• Some may ask, why not print this in a go? Yes we can, not an issue at all. However to allow doctors and patient to understand the heart structure in a detailed manner, we made the model in assembly format.

We hope that this model will aid surgeons in their surgery understanding, as well as helping patient to understand better of their own heart condition.