Mitral regurgitation is a serious heart valve condition often seen in elderly and frail patients with multiple illnesses. For them, the risks of undergoing conventional open heart surgery are too high. On top of the difficulties in predicting whether a patient will benefit from surgery, mitral valve disease also varies from person to person, making other newer and less invasive treatments (such as robotic-assisted surgery) expensive and difficult.
Supported by our £10,000 grant, and working in collaboration with scientists in Canada, Dr Apu Bharucha, a structural heart intervention research fellow, and his team have been able to create life-size 3D printed models of patients’ mitral valves and cavities from ultrasound images. Using a bench-top heart simulator, the team are studying the 3D replicas in-situ in order to use machine learning (AI) to model disease, practice less-invasive surgery and plot potential treatment outcomes.
They plan to share their learnings via the development of an open-source online library of mitral valve and cavity images –the first of its kind in the world. This valuable resource will enable other surgical teams, nationally and internationally, to print 3D models for use in research and training. The team also aims to help create a national surgical training programme to teach others how to use 3D printing technology and perform minimal access mitral valve surgery.
