A four-year-old named Mia Gonzalez spent the first 3½ years of her life missing out of everything. She missed out of stuff like day-care and dance classes cause she keep getting colds and pneumonia. Every time she went outside to play she got easily winded and had to take multiple asthma treatments and medication just to help keep her breathing. After ten hospitals stays the doctors finally realized that she had a malformation in her heart aorta which is the vessel that pumps blood to the heart. She did need an operation that would need to close off the part of her heart that was putting pressure on her windpipe and making it hard to swallow, breath, and get rid of the mucus that drains in the back of her throat when she got a cold. Her mom said …show more content…
He showed it to some of his working buddies for their input. He carried it around in a gym bag. Then he finally had a thought. He said that instead of making an incision on the left side that he would make on the right side. He also thought that for since the defect was a double aortic arch that he should cut into the right side. He said that the model helped him feel better about the surgery on Mia. He also said that if he did not have the model of her heart that he would probably have made the wrong cut. He said that using the model that there was no doubt and that surgeons hate doubt. He adds that the model saved the team and the patient about two hours because he was able to have a plan to do the surgery. Burke said that they have made more than or almost twenty or twenty-five models of other patients hearts using the 3D printer to help them in surgery and to asses the problems with their hearts. In the past they would not have operated on patients if the operation was to tricky, but they can now operate and help out all of their of their patients. There are about 75 hospitals in the U.S. that have 3D printers and about 200 worldwide that have 3D