Pediatric throat surgeon Kaalan Johnson and his team at Seattle Children's have traveled to South America to teach 3D printing models of children's trachea to other surgeons there.
The procedure, known as a slide tracheoplasty, is used to help kids who have difficulty breathing or swallowing, and the 3D models allow surgeons to rehearse the surgery with a life-size patient model before actually operating on the child, KING 5 reports.
"Surgeons really like to practice.
So they are more like the concert violinist, and this is a patient that they actually want to practice their craft on," says Seth Friedman, a scientist and manager of Innovation Imaging and Simulation modeling at Seattle Children's.
"So this allows a much more equitable distribution of experience getting prepared for not just the procedure itself but also patient-specific preparation for surgeries."
Johnson will continue teaching the tracheoplasty training in Chile next year.
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