A fully functioning, 3D printed heart is the holy grail of the 3D printing industry. Thanks to the Military University of Technology in Warsaw we are one step closer to this goal.
These day’s 3D printing biological structures are often in the news, so it is already possible to 3D print bones and tissue. Now researcher (Dr Krzysztof Murawski PhD, Dr Leszek Grad, Dr Artur Archiuch PhD and Professor Pustelny) at the university in Poland have teamed up to develop a new design for 3D printed heart chambers.
The result of their work looks like a 3D printed pump but their goal was to create heart chambers with high efficiency. To test different designs and technologies they used a Zortrax M200 3D printer. With every 3D printed model the results got better and the design used was more efficient. At the moment this is just in theory a 3D printed heart but the team hopes to use the same design together with 3D bio printing to create a “real” heart in the future.
Throughout the ongoing development we know which form would be very efficient for a 3D printed heart. Now researchers all over the world need to work on a better technique for 3D printing biological structures. Until a fully functional, 3D printed heart could be transplanted into a human, it will still take a lot of development and time. But there are also other sectors where 3D printing is used for cardiac research, for example a pneumatic intracardiac-catheder-pump.
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