Lucy Boucher suffered heart
failure as a baby, leaving her kidneys starved of oxygen. After successful
heart surgery, Lucy faced a lifetime on dialysis. But the three-year-old no
longer needs this thrice-weekly treatment after receiving a donor kidney from
father Chris two months ago in a ground-breaking operation.
Surgeons at Guy's and St Thomas'
Hospital in London used 3D printed models to discover how best to perform the
tricky procedure.
Mr. Pankaj Chandak,
specialist registrar in transplant surgery at guy's and St. Thomas' hospital, said
"So, this is the abdominal print of Lucy's abdomen. Now, she's a 10
kilogram child, she's two years old, so this was produced essentially from
measurements from CT and MR scans. And this is Lucy's liver, this is the side
walls of her abdomen and this is her bony pelvis. So the printer actually
produces this in different densities, so this is quite hard whereas this is
quite soft - enabling us to move it just like it would do in the human
body."
The hospital says it's the
first time in the world that 3D printing was used to aid a kidney transplant
involving an adult donor and child recipient.
Mr. Pankaj Chandak, added;
"We made a decision at the time that we can fit the kidney into this space
here without having to remove Lucy's right kidney. And the best lie of the
kidney was essentially not like that, but like that. And we would then join the
vessels up in this manner here, there's the vein and there's the artery, and
then we would join the urethra onto the bladder. So essentially it was fitting
in like that." The four-hour surgery was a success, and Lucy's speedy
recovery has surprised even her family.
Chris Boucher, Father of the
2yr old, said, "I was really wiped out for the first couple of weeks,
whereas within a week or so Lucy was bounding around everywhere; literally
bouncing on the bed, running around the ward happily playing, and I felt
shattered."
For Lucy the transplant
means she's on the road to recovery and looking forward to attending nursery
next year in Northern Ireland.
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