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Robotic versions of the actual human organ are aimed at helping doctors find ways to treat heart disease that are tailored to individual patients.

By Charlie Keegan THE unexpected death at St Luke’s Hospital, Kilkenny on Sunday 19 February of Cecil Whelan, Monacurragh, Carlow has left the people of Carlow…

The addition of patient-specific sleeves and pneumatics can “activate” 3D printed models to better plan for procedures.

"Were not only printing the hearts anatomy but also replicating its mechanics and physiology."

Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a 3D-printed heart replica that pumps and looks like a human heart.

Researchers hope these customized, robotic hearts can provide realistic models so that doctors, researchers and medical device manufacturers can use them in testing therapies for different types of heart disease.

The MIT engineers developed a procedure to 3D print a soft and flexible replica of a patients heart, including a patients aorta -- the major artery that carries blood out of the heart to the rest of the body.

Experts at the Massachusetts Institute of Techonology (MIT) have created a replica of patients heart that they say can even start to pump like the real thing.

From Bloomberg: Using scans from 15 patients with aortic stenosis, a narrowing of heart valves that impedes blood flow, researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Cleveland Clinic and other institutions developed a system that mimics blood flow and pressure in individual diseased hearts.

No two hearts beat alike. The size and shape of the the heart can vary from one person to the next. These differences can be particularly pronounced for people living with heart disease, as their hearts and major vessels work harder to overcome any compromised function.