Pathology-Specific Heart Simulators for Medical Education

Medical courses and workshops that involve the usage of cadaveric specimen would typically require dedicated settings and arrangements. Furthermore, specimens exhibiting matching disease or pathology to the course context could often be a challenge.

To circumvent these obstacles, Dr. Chen Ching Kit, a senior Consultant Pediatric Cardiologist at KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital, approached us to produce heart simulators that reflected different congenital heart diseases – such as Double Outlet Right Ventricle (DORV), Atrial Septal Defect (ASD), Transposition of great arteries (including ccTGA), among others.

AuMed performed 3D digital reconstruction of the heart myocardium extracted from the provided DICOM. Prior to 3D fabrication of these tangible simulators, a prototyping phase was introduced in order to curate 3D materials which enabled realistic tactile feedback when the users “operated” on the heart simulators. The team has used the same workflow in producing cardiac simulators for other purposes including patient-specific pre-surgical planning.

The heart simulators were used in a workshop titled “Surgical Morphology and Imaging of Congenital Heart Disease”, organized by the Cardiac Centre of the same hospital in 2016