As the director of the structural heart team at Kaleida Health’s Gates Vascular Institute in Buffalo, New York, I perform minimally invasive, endovascular surgeries to repair structural defects of the heart. I specialize in valve replacements, clip procedures, and other structural heart treatments. Rather than cracking open the chest cavity to access the heart, I use blood vessels as conduits to deploy medical devices for these endovascular procedures. The ability to practice on realistic models is extremely valuable.

Vascular flow models are created by biomedical engineers. They take computed tomography (CT) scans or medical images of a patient’s heart and convert them into the type of file that is uploaded onto a 3D printer to create an accurate multidimensional anatomy. This conversion process can be performed in a matter of hours and we are looking for ways to accelerate it.

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