Rapid prototyping is a new technology that may play a significant role in planning catheter-based interventions and serve as an educational tool for understanding structural heart disease.
Rapid prototyping offers a promising new technology to overcome the limitations of 2D imaging in understanding complex 3D spatial relationships for structural heart disease interventions.
As the appreciation of structural heart disease in children and adults has increased and as catheter-based closure procedures are now being performed in clinical practice, cardiovascular physicians have multiple compelling new reasons to better understand cardiac anatomic and spatial relationships. Current 2-dimensional imaging techniques remain limited both in their ability to represent the complex 3-dimensional relationships present in structural heart disease and in their capacity to adequately facilitate often complex corrective procedures. This review discusses the cardiovascular applications of rapid prototyping, a new technology that may not only play a significant role in the planning of catheter-based interventions but also may serve as a valuable educational tool to enhance the medical community's understanding of the many forms of structural heart disease.
Kim et al. (Mon,) conducted a review in Structural heart disease. Rapid prototyping was evaluated. Rapid prototyping is a new technology that may play a significant role in planning catheter-based interventions and serve as an educational tool for understanding structural heart disease.