Using patient-specific 3D or virtual reality (VR) models for preoperative assessment could help anesthesiologists better plan for procedures involving patients with suspected difficult airways, according to an abstract presented at the Euroanaesthesia 2021 meeting in Munich, Germany.
"With a specific plan in place, there is less trial and error, wastage of equipment and trauma to the patient," the authors write.
Although these modeling technologies have been used to train residents in intubation procedures, they are not as widely used in clinical anesthesia, said lead author Ruth Shaylor, BMBS, an anesthesiologist at the Tel Aviv Medical Center in Israel. "Until now, we hadn't realized how it can be useful for us," she told Medscape Medical News.
Dr Ruth Shaylor
That all changed when a new thoracic surgeon joined the hospital and brought with him pediatric patients, a group with whom Shaylor and colleagues had not previously worked. "Suddenly, we were presented with a patient where in theory, we knew what to do, but in practice, we'd never done it before," she said. Because she already regularly used 3D-printing to train residents, she made the next logical leap: "If I print off tracheas to teach the residents how to intubate, why don't I print a patient-specific trachea to teach myself?" she recalled.
