Matching Polyjet 3D Printed Material Properties to Human Left Heart Tissue Mechanical Behavior.

Abstract

3D printing has proven very beneficial in the medical field, especially in cardiovascular medicine, by providing cardiologists and cardiac surgeons with 3D models of patient anatomy for procedure planning. These models are helpful in providing visual aid but are typically simple in design and it is often unknown how the printed model's mechanical properties compare to cardiovascular tissue mechanical properties. Stratasys has developed tissue-mimicking materials; although there are almost no published characterization details on how these printed polyjet materials compare to published human cardiovascular tissue data. We compared J750 digital anatomy printer material properties to left human heart tissue properties using nonlinear elastic constitutive models. We mechanically tested 73 polyjet printer materials (Stratasys J750 DAP) and successfully created a database identifying which printer materials were the best "fit" for each cardiac region of interest. We found that all J750 DAP materials exhibited stiffer behavior than each cardiac tissue region. The top three materials that fit each cardiac region the best were SoftDM400, SolidInternalOrgans_FiberContraction6, and Liver_HighlyContractile, respectively.