IIT Madras’s virtual reality model helps Chennai doctors implant a pump in the boy’s heart

New Delhi: The 11-year-old Egyptian boy is one of the thousands who are waiting for the curbs on their overseas trip to be removed. IIT Madras for his lockdown time in India. After being refused at several hospitals in the United States and Europe, the child underwent life-saving surgery at MGM Hospital in Chennai using a virtual reality model to implant a heart pump.

According to Dr. KK Balakrishnan of the Heart and Lung Transplant Institute at MGM Healthcare, this was the first successful implant surgery in India, but a similar procedure was performed twice in the United States.

The technique will also be presented at the American Society of Internal Viscera Annual Meeting in Chicago on Monday. The conference is effectively being held for the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Who could have imagined that children could be saved by wearing PlayStation-type glasses on their heads and visualizing magnificent images in a 3D environment? Was suffering from severe pulmonary hypertension (very high pressure in the lungs) with an illness condition and recurrent heart failure hospitalization for the past year.He was airlifted from Cairo in an air ambulance before the lockdown was announced. He was told, “he told PTI.

“He was a frail, very ill boy, with skin and bones, drifting in and out of consciousness. After being dismissed at several hospitals in the United States and Western Europe, his child was a pediatric cardiovascular system in Cairo. He was referred to me by a dentist and was treated, and it was easy to see why he was refused at some hospitals: his very high lung pressure meant that he was excluded from heart transplants, There are no commercial long-term implantable heart pumps called LVADs or left ventricular assist devices for small-sized children.

After arriving here, the doctor explained that the child’s heart failure had worsened. The only option was to implant a battery-powered mechanical pump to see if the left ventricle of the heart would help pump out the rest of the body.

“There were two major obstacles. Can existing pumps be made for adults and fit into the small chest cavity of a child? What if I couldn’t close my chest after surgery?” It would have been a disaster, and it was a big problem because the size of the heart chamber, the left ventricle, was severely constrained, and the size of a very small cavity was overfilled with useless muscles. , There was no way to know if it would stick out if it was too big, “he said.

Balakrishna then contacted the Engineering Design Department of IIT Madras to see if it could build a virtual reality model from CT scans of the child and pump, and performed a virtual implant to confirm the implant was possible. Did.

“A virtual model was built and I wore 3D glasses that were mounted on my head like a computer game, and I was able to see that the pump was virtually embedded in various positions and the procedure was possible. IIT Madras Professor Krishnakumar has been very successful in implanting with the trust of this knowledge.

“The boys are recovering quickly, gaining weight and dancing to Bollywood songs. When the travel restrictions are lifted, they are waiting to return to Cairo,” he added. It was

Since March 22, international travel from within the country has been suspended prior to the national blockade to contain the spread of the new coronavirus. According to the Johns Hopkins University, nearly 6 million cases of coronavirus infections have been reported worldwide, killing more than 365,000 and recovering about 2.5 million.

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