SAND SPRINGS, Okla. — A Sand Springs high school student played an important role in creating a needed training tool for Warren Clinic Maternal and Fetal Medicine. They now have a 3D fetal heart model for their residents and patients.
Monday afternoon senior Nate Bolte was inside the engineering class at Charles Page High School. He was tasked with creating the 3D model.
“The complexity of it — it was much different than anything I had done before,” Bolte said.
Bolte says the 10-hour print on the 3D printer was the easy part. The research to create the 20-week-old heart model took months
“There’s a lot of different developmental stages that it goes through in a relatively short amount of time, so you have to find the right one,” Bolte said.
Engineering Instructor Jessica Sprague says it took a lot of work and trial and error to get things just right.
“It was a triumphant moment for sure,” Sprague said. “There were struggles along the way not only in the design process but also in the technical printing process.”
At about 20 weeks, Sonographer Cassie Hathaway says the fetal heart would be about the size of a quarter.
“I wanted the heart model to be bigger so that we could just kind of blow it up for patients to get all the detail that we’re trying to show them,” said Hathaway.
Hathaway is a graduate of Charles Page High School. She reached out to them knowing they’d be capable of creating this important training tool.
“It’s like incredible,” said Hathaway. “The attention to detail is amazing.”
Hathaway says in her work dealing with high-risk pregnancies, the heart is vital. The model will be used to train other sonographers and residents and also to give patients a better understanding of what they’re dealing with.
“To help them visualize what normal cardiac anatomy should look like and then what’s wrong,” said Hathaway. “Where their baby’s heart went wrong.”
For Sprague, she says it’s important to provide her students the opportunity for real-world application.
“When you’re thinking about this is someone’s child, and they want to have some context to what is impacting their baby, that’s huge,” said Sprague.
Nate says it’s been a passion project and he hopes to have even more opportunities like this before he graduates.
Oct. 24, 2022.
“The opportunities I have here are excellent and I’m really glad I have all of these different pathways I can explore here at school,” said Bolte.
The Warren Clinic Maternal and Fetal Medicine plans to start using the 3D model in the coming days.
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