Sydney hospitals are preparing to use 3D printers to produce life-size replicas of their patients' hearts to prepare for surgery.
Within a year, patients at Liverpool and St Vincent's hospitals are likely to have access to the technique, which will help surgeons have a better understanding of a patient's problem before they operate.
Doctors say the new technologies will reduce patient deaths and injury, by decreasing the time operations take and preventing unexpected problems.
Cardiologist and clinical faculty member at the Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, James Otton, said for the first time in Australia he had used a 3D printer to make a replica of a patient's heart.
"The idea is that a patient can come and have a scan of their heart and then we can print out the heart in 3D so we can plan surgery and treatment," he said.
Dr Otton, who is a cardiologist at St Vincent's Private Hospital and the director of cardiac MRI at Liverpool Hospital, said as robotic and other minimally invasive surgery became more common, planning surgeries would become more important. He said the hearts could now be physically printed fairly easily, but "it's the 90 per cent of work before that to get the CT scan into the 3D model using image processing to remove the noise that is hard".
The 3D heart was printed last week, although it will not be used for treatment yet, and he expects the technique will be more widely used within a year in the most difficult surgeries, which make up about 10 per cent of cases. He will also be opening a 3D echocardiogram laboratory.
Associate Professor Kumud Dhital, a cardiothoracic and transplant surgeon at St Vincent's, said when patients had complicated heart problems it could be hard to predict what would happen in surgery.
"In congenital heart disease, for example, you have a lot of anatomical anomalies that these babies are born with, and they can often be corrected but they are palliated with several operations to get them to a stage that is compatible with life," he said. "The heart can be back to front, the chambers can be connected the wrong way. [3D hearts will make it] far easier to plan your operative procedure, reducing its length and the uncertainty of discovering something unknown."
He said crude "bioprinters" were already in development that could potentially print 3D hearts with the same structures and materials as a normal heart, which could be used to practise operations before they occurred, fit implants to individual needs, and train new surgeons.
Eventually, he believed fully functioning hearts could be bioprinted, with Australia at the cutting edge if the research was adequately funded. However, such devices would be extremely complex as they would require different types of cells to work in unison.
Dr Otton's 3D heart will be on display at St Vincent's Research Week from September 8 to 12.
