CHENNAI: A 11-year-old boy from Egypt, who was suffering from a life-threatening condition called restrictive cardiomyopathy and severe pulmonary hypertension (very high pressure in the lungs) with recurrent heart failure for the last one year, was airlifted from Cairo. After being turned down by several hospitals in the US and western Europe, the child was referred to Dr KR Balakrishnan, chairman, Cardiac Sciences, and director, Institute of Heart and Lung Transplant & Mechanical Circulatory Support, MGM Healthcare by the pediatric cardiologist in Cairo.
After arriving here, the child’s condition worsened, and the only option was to consider implanting an LVAD, a battery-operated mechanical pump, to help the left chamber of his heart to pump blood to the rest of the body. But the existing pumps are built for adults and the size of the left ventricle was heavily muscle-bound. Dr Balakrishnan approached Professor R Krishna Kumar from the Department of Engineering Design, IIT Madras, and requested a virtual reality model to be built from the CT scan of the child, so that a virtual implant could be carried out.
This model was fit by the doctor wearing a head-mounted 3D glass. The boy has since recovered rapidly, gained weight and has taken to dancing to Bollywood songs. They are waiting to return to Cairo, after restrictions are lifted. This technique will be presented at the annual conference of The American Society of Artificial Internal Organs in Chicago, on June 1, via a virtual set-up.
Commenting on the boy’s successful surgical procedure, Dr Balakrishnan said, “We thoroughly evaluated the child before planning for the LVAD. We had limited options. We decided to go ahead with the heart pump implant only after the virtual model built at IIT showed that it was feasible.” Professor Krishna Kumar said, “There were many challenges technically as the image clarity of the commercial software built into the imaging machine did not meet the requirements.
After intense discussions on the algorithms to be used, Sathish Kumar, my student, built the virtual reality model in one night, as time was crucial.” The child’s mother, a pediatrician, thanking the MGM Healthcare, said, “We had almost given up hope. Our child had been ailing for a few years and we could not bear to see him suffer like this. We are grateful that we were referred to this facility where the doctors were confident and ensured a fresh lease of life to our son.”