Organ phantoms are widely used for evaluating medical technologies, training clinical practitioners, as well as surgical planning. In the context of cardiovascular disease, a patient-specific cardiac phantom can play an important role for interventional cardiology procedures. However, phantoms with complicated structures are difficult to fabricate by conventional manufacturing methods. The emergence of three-dimensional (3D) printing with soft materials provides the opportunity to produce phantoms with complex geometries and realistic properties. In this work, the aim was to explore the use of a direct 3D printing technique to produce multimodal imaging cardiac phantoms and to test the physical properties of the new materials used, namely the Poro-Lay series and TangoPlus. The cardiac phantoms were first modeled using real data segmented from a patient chest computer tomography (CT) scan and then printed with the novel materials. They were then tested quantitatively in terms of stiffness and ultrasound (US) acoustic values and qualitatively with US, CT, and magnetic resonance imaging systems. From the stiffness measurements, Lay-fomm 40 had the closest Young's modulus to real myocardium with an error of 29–54%, while TangoPlus had the largest difference. From the US acoustics measurements, Lay-fomm 40 also demonstrated the closest soft tissue-mimicking properties with both the smallest attenuation and impedance differences. Furthermore, the imaging results show that the phantoms are compatible with multiple imaging modalities and thus have potential to be used for interventional procedure simulation and testing of novel interventional devices. In conclusion, direct 3D printing with Poro-Lay and TangoPlus is a promising method for manufacture of multimodal imaging phantoms with complicated structures, especially for soft patient-specific phantoms.

中文翻译：

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使用直接三维打印的介入过程仿真超声兼容心脏模型的开发和测试

器官模型被广泛用于评估医疗技术，培训临床医生以及外科手术计划。在心血管疾病的背景下，特定于患者的心脏幻像可以在介入性心脏病程序中发挥重要作用。然而，具有复杂结构的体模难以通过常规制造方法来制造。使用软材料进行的三维（3D）打印的出现提供了生产具有复杂几何形状和逼真的属性的模型的机会。在这项工作中，目的是探索使用直接3D打印技术产生多模态成像心脏幻像并测试所使用的新材料（即Poro-Lay系列和TangoPlus）的物理特性。首先使用从患者胸部计算机断层扫描（CT）扫描中分割出的真实数据对心脏模型进行建模，然后使用新颖的材料进行打印。然后对它们的刚度和超声（US）声学值进行定量测试，并在US，CT和磁共振成像系统中进行定性测试。从刚度测量结果来看，Lay-fomm 40的杨氏模量与真实心肌最接近，误差为29-54％，而TangoPlus的差异最大。从美国的声学测量来看，Lay-fomm 40还展示了最接近的软组织模仿特性，同时衰减和阻抗差异最小。此外，成像结果表明，体模与多种成像方式兼容，因此具有用于介入程序仿真和新型介入装置测试的潜力。总之，使用Poro-Lay和TangoPlus进行直接3D打印是一种制造具有复杂结构的多模态成像体模的有前途的方法，特别是针对特定患者的软体模。