Child's heart printed in 3D to aid complex surgery

Louisville Kentucky cardiothoracic surgeon Erle Austin has performed successful heart repair surgery on a 14 month old infant named Roland Lian Cung Bawi, heart surgery on such a young patient is not unheard of, of course, what's new is that Austin was able to map out his surgical approach using a nearly exact model of the patients heart, it had been printed on a 3D printer.

Erle Austin

Young Roland had been born with four congenital heart defects—doctors had known since before he was born that his heart had problems.

Fixing them all would prove to be a challenge. When it came time to plan the surgery, Austin consulted with other surgeons and found each of them had different ideas on the best way to fix the heart.

The ideal approach would involve the least amount of cutting and suturing—but that can be hard to plan using only conventional scanning techniques.

Looking for more precision, Austin turned to the engineering school at the University of Louisville, they'd been researching different kinds of 3D printing technology.

Researchers at the University worked with radiologists at Kosair Children's Hospital to create a means for converting data from a CT scan of Roland's heart to data that could be used with a 3D printer.

The two seemed a perfect match as CT scanning uses the same basic idea as 3D printing, it takes pictures of slices and puts them together on a computer screen to form a whole, and 3D printing is achieved by laying down one layer or "slice" of material at a time.

The 3D printing team used a MakerBot Replicator 2X, to print the heart (in three pieces) at twice its normal size, they also used a flexible type of plastic filament known as "Ninja Flex" instead of ABS.

Ninja Flex allowed the surgeon to bend the finished heart in ways that resembled a real human heart.

Printing the heart took approximately 20 hours at a cost of roughly $600.

Austin told local news reporters that the printed heart let him plan the surgery in ways he'd never experienced before, it allowed for a single surgery (this past February 10) and greatly reduced cutting and suturing, which ultimately led to a much quicker recovery for Roland, who by all accounts is now doing just fine.

Astro-Photography: Cygnus Loop Filaments

As an end of the year finale, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and WIYN partners offer this new wide-field image of the Cygnus loop.

The Cygnus Loop is a large supernova remnant: the gaseous remains of a massive star that exploded long ago.

It is located about 1,500 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Cygnus, the Swan.

Astronomers estimate the supernova explosion that produced the nebula occurred between 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.

First noted in 1784 by William Herschel, it is so large that its many parts have been catalogued as separate objects, including NGC 6992, NGC 6995 and IC 1340 along the eastern (left) side of the image, NGC 6974 and NGC 6979 near the top-center, and the Veil Nebula (NGC 6960) and Pickering’s Triangle along the western (right) edge.

The bright star near the western edge of the image, known as 52 Cygnus, is not associated with the supernova.

The data were obtained with the NOAO Mosaic 1 camera, with observations in the Oxygen [OIII] (blue), Sulphur [S II] (green) and Hydrogen-Alpha (red) filters. 

Dark matter, scaffolding of universe detected for the first time

A filament of dark matter has been directly detected between the galaxy clusters Abell 222 and Abell 223. 

The blue shading and yellow contour lines represent the density of matter. Image credit: Jorg Dietrich, U-M Department of Physics

Scientists have, for the first time, directly detected part of the invisible dark matter skeleton of the universe, where more than half of all matter is believed to reside.

The discovery, led by a University of Michigan physics researcher, confirms a key prediction in the prevailing theory of how the universe's current web-like structure evolved.

The map of the known universe shows that most galaxies are organized into clusters, but some galaxies are situated along filaments that connect the clusters.

Cosmologists have theorized that dark matter undergirds those filaments, which serve as highways of sorts, guiding galaxies toward the gravitational pull of the massive clusters.

Dark matter's contribution had been predicted with computer simulations, and its shape had been roughed out based on the distribution of the galaxies. But no one had directly detected it until now.

"We found the dark matter filaments. For the first time, we can see them," said Jorg Dietrich, a physics research fellow in the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science and the Arts.

Dietrich is first author of a paper on the findings published online in Nature and to appear in the July 12 print edition.

Dark matter, whose composition is still a mystery, doesn't emit or absorb light, so astronomers can't see it directly with telescopes. They deduce that it exists based on how its gravity affects visible matter.

Scientists estimate that dark matter makes up more than 80 percent of the universe. To "see" the dark matter component of the filament that connects the clusters Abell 222 and 223, Dietrich and his colleagues took advantage of a phenomenon called gravitational lensing.

The gravity of massive objects such as galaxy clusters acts as a lens to bend and distort the light from more distant objects as it passes. Dietrich's team observed tens of thousands of galaxies beyond the supercluster.

They were able to determine the extent to which the supercluster distorted galaxies, and with that information, they could plot the gravitational field and the mass of the Abell 222 and 223 clusters. Seeing this for the first time was "exhilarating," Dietrich said.

"It looks like there's a bridge that shows that there is additional mass beyond what the clusters contain," he said. "The clusters alone cannot explain this additional mass," he said.

Scientists before Dietrich assumed that the gravitational lensing signal would not be strong enough to give away dark matter's configuration. But Dietrich and his colleagues focused on a peculiar cluster system whose axis is oriented toward Earth, so that the lensing effects could be magnified.

"This result is a verification that for many years was thought to be impossible," Dietrich said.

The team also found a spike in X-ray emissions along the filament, due to an excess of hot, ionized ordinary matter being pulled by gravity toward the massive filament, but they estimate that 90 percent or more of the filament's mass is dark matter.

The researchers used data obtained with the Subaru telescope, operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. They also used the XMM-Newton satellite for X-ray observations.

This work is funded by the National Science Foundation and NASA. Other contributors are from the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology at Stanford University; Ohio University; Max Planck Institut fur extraterrestrische Physik in Germany; The University of Edinburgh and the University of Oxford.