DiversityNursing Blog

By SYDNEY LUPKIN

At Boston Children’s Hospital, doctors perform practice surgeries with replicas of their patients’ body parts. Though the hospital has had a simulation program for about a decade, it started 3D-printing children’s body parts about a year ago, said Dr. Peter Weinstock, director of the hospital’s simulator program.

“They perfect what they want to do before ever bringing the child into the operating room or putting them to sleep,” Weinstock said.

The models are also used to help parents understand their children’s surgeries before the operation and to educate students afterward, Weinstock said.

The printer is precise, with a resolution of between 16 and 32 microns per layer. That means each layer is about the width of a “filament of cotton,” Weinstock said. And since the printer can print multiple resins or textures, doctors can work on replicas that model different tissue types, like brain matter and blood vessels.

The printer only takes a few hours to do their work once CT scans and other forms of imaging are collected and rendered into 3D models. A child’s finger might take three hours to print, but a chest replica they made last week took longer, Weinstock said.

The team has already printed about 100 body parts over the last year and demand is growing, Weinstock said, adding that the printer is running around the clock.

Dr. Ed Smith, a pediatric neurosurgeon at Boston Children’s, said he recently used several different 3D models to perform brain surgery on a 15-year-old patient with an abnormal cluster of veins above his optical nerve. One wrong maneuver and the patient could have gone blind.

He even used a see-through replica of the patient’s skull on a light box in the operating room as a reference.

“It’s kind of like being superman with X-ray vision where you can actually hold this up and see right through it,” Smith said.

The surgery, which would have normally taken five or six hours, wound up clocking in at 2 hours and 20 minutes, Smith said.

Though Boston Children’s hasn’t conducted any formal studies of how the models help surgeons, Smith said he’s heard anecdotally that they result in shorter surgeries because doctors know what to expect.

Source: http://abcnews.go.com

By NPR Staff

As hearing aid technology has improved, so has health reporter Kathleen Raven's confidence.

When she was 5 years old, she found out she had a hearing problem. Complications during her birth led to damage in her inner ear.

"I couldn't hear water dripping from a faucet. I couldn't hear crickets on a summer night," she tells NPR's Kelly McEvers. "I couldn't hear sirens, couldn't hear fire alarms in our school fire drills, so I did a lot of watching other people."

The diagnosis was moderate to severe loss of high- and low-frequency hearing. When it comes to speech, certain sounds are out of range for her. Sounds like "ch," "sh" and "th" blend together.

Raven says she reads lips "religiously," but when she can't see a person's lips, she can understand maybe every third word — that is, without a hearing aid.

She got her first hearing aids — a large, clunky set — back when she was 5 in 1993.

"They were about 2 inches long and very thick, and they connected to a very large ear mold inside my ear," she says. "They call them flesh-colored, but they're not the color of anyone's flesh." Her young classmates teased her.

But the technology kept changing. Every few years, her parents would shell out $4,000 to $5,000 on each new device. By the time she got to high school, she had her first completely inside-the-ear hearing aid. That changed everything.

"I just became more confident walking into crowds. I didn't try to hide, I didn't arrange my hair to cover my ears. I started being more talkative, going out with my friends more," says Raven. "I didn't realize how much that fear had impacted me until I got completely in-the-ear hearing aids."

She went on to college and started pursuing her dream of reporting.

"I encountered a few raised eyebrows along the way," she says. "Why do you want to make a living of hearing people when that's a challenge for you?"

She pushed past the skeptics and became a reporter. Today she writes about oncology forBioPharm Insight.

As years passed and the technology progressed, Raven thought her hearing had maxed out. But with each upgrade, she discovered more sounds. Two years ago, she received her latest pair, which cost $7,000.

When her audiologist put them in her ears, she heard an unfamiliar noise. "I just happened to smack my lips together, like you're tasting something," she recalls. "It's just such a simple sound, but it was earth-shattering."

Her audiologist put on Beethoven, and she heard new instruments and trills. "It was like seeing the world in 3-D, or hearing the world in 3-D for the first time," Raven says.

These latest hearing aids are basically invisible. Even still, now she tells people about her hearing loss.

"Five years ago, I still was not ever telling people unless it was absolutely necessary. And now I do work it into conversation in the first five minutes or so," she says. If she needs to ask someone to repeat something, she'll just add, "I have a hearing problem."

"That phrase was impossible for me to say for the first 20 years of my life," Raven says. "Now I think it's very important for hearing loss to be accepted for younger people, of course, and also for older people."

Source: npr.org