How Engineers are Helping Make a Rare, Complex Surgery Safer
Development engineers in the Department of Biomedical Engineering are helping make cloacal repair safer.
One in 50,000 girls are born with common cloaca, a rare, congenital malformation in which the genital tract, the urinary tract and the colorectal or intestinal tract end together in one channel instead of being three separate structures.
“No two cases are the same,” said Payam Saadai, a pediatric surgeon specializing in cloacal repair at UC Davis Children’s Hospital. “Everyone is a little different. The way the structures connect is different. If you go into surgery without a good road map, you could run into complications.”
A collaboration between Saadai, the 3D PrintViz Lab and the Translating Engineering Advances to Engineering, or TEAM, Lab is doing just that: creating road maps through three-dimensional printed models to help surgical teams plan for this complex surgery.
Once patients are scanned with a CT machine, Osama Raslan, a professor of radiology and co-founder of the 3D PrintViz Lab at UC Davis Health, reviews the two-dimensional medical image stack to isolate the regions relevant to the surgery. Osama then compiles the visual information to develop a rough 3D model to share with the TEAM Lab.
The TEAM Lab refines the rough model and assigns labels to help orientate surgeons before sharing the final 3D model for review with Raslan and Saadai for approval. Once approved, the TEAM Lab prints the model for the surgeons to use as a road map before surgery.
“Models do what two-dimensional scans can’t do. 3D takes away the guesswork,” Raslan said. “You can hold the 3D model and change the positioning in your hands.”
