Born with a defective windpipe, Garrett Peterson has had difficulty breathing since birth — and has never left the hospital as a result. His doctors weren’t sure how long they could keep him alive. Last year, after reading about an experimental procedure that helped Kaiba Gionfriddo — a baby with similar breathing problems — Peterson’s father turned to pediatric ENT specialist Dr. Glenn Green and his colleague, biomedical engineer Scott Hollister, for help.
Green and Hollister worked on Gionfriddo’s experimental procedure. Hollister, who runs the University of Michigan 3-D Lab, had been working on 3-D printing for biomaterials and tissue engineering for nearly two decades. For Peterson’s procedure, Hollister combined his software with Mimics — a medical image processing software from Materialise, a rapid prototyping and CAD software development firm based in Belgium — to create the splints.
Peterson went through the life-saving surgery when he was only 16 months old. Green and pediatric cardiovascular surgeon Dr. Richard Ohye inserted the splints around Peterson’s windpipe to help him breathe better. The splints are designed to support his windpipe as it builds strength, before eventually dissolving in his body.