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SALT LAKE CITY — Two babies, one 3-D printed model and a broken heart. What you're about to witness as the future of medicine.
"She's Ella 2.0. She's a new baby. She's so happy," said Katie Knoell, Ella's mom.
Getting Ella and her twin sister, Livi, here in the first place was tough. Struggling with infertility, Jason, Katie Knoell's husband, had surgery and she underwent in vitro fertilization to conceive. Expecting twins, doctors found an abnormality on her 24-week ultrasound. "Her heart was on the wrong side of her chest," Katie Knoell said.
It's an exceedingly rare condition; one her cardiologist had never seen before. A hole in her heart and crisscross ventricular valve connections. Despite all this, these soon-to-be parents were strangely calm. "We just felt like we had so many miracles come up to get her here that it just had to play out well for us," she said.
Doctors told them when Ella was born she might have surgery immediately. But if she was stable, they would wait. Or, there was another option. "Spend what time we could with her. That's when we got freaked out," Katie Knoell said.
When the time came, they braced themselves for the worst. "They cut the cord and she was gone," Jason Knoell said. Doctors whisked her away to the neonatal intensive care unit.
Amazingly, Ella was stable. So after a month in the hospital, she went home. But successful surgery was the only chance she had at a normal life.
Nine months later, surgeons faced a nearly impossible task. "They're looking at it and saying, 'OK, so what am I looking at here?' I mean these are doctors that know what they're doing, and it's complicated for them," he said.
Ella's anatomy was so complex, doctors wouldn't know exactly what they were facing until they got inside the operating room. To remove the mystery, they did a cardiac CT and printed a 3-D model of her heart.
Dr. Phil Burch of Primary Children's Hospital was her surgeon. "This actually let us plan ahead and really not spend much time on the bypass machine. It made something that could have been a struggle in the OR relatively straight forward."
More surgeons are using this technique. Last year, surgeons at Intermountain Medical Center used a 3-D printed kidney to help them remove a tumor, saving a woman's life and her kidney. Doctors in New York used 3-D printing to map conjoined twins' anatomy before surgically separating them. In Miami, they used a toy-like cardboard box with an iPhone inside to see 3-D images to plan a surgery that saved a baby's life.
Before going in the OR with Ella, Burch practiced every cut he would make. "This is how her heart sits, kind of rotated this way, and we made an incision here, below the aorta," Burch said. And it worked.
"That model saved her life," Ella's dad said. "It's as simple as that."
While they left her heart on the right side of her chest, they made it into a two-ventricle heart, as close to normal as possible.
Katie Knoell said, "She's just a miracle: one after the other."
Two babies, one 3-D printed model, and two healed hearts. Twin sisters who can grow up together, and live, laugh, and love life to the fullest.
Doctors are hopeful that Ella will have a long, normal life. She can even play sports, and they don't expect any limitations.
