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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Convex and Concave Model 3D Printing for Designing

Right-side Bronchial Blocker for Infants

Xiaomin Duan , Wei Wang , Wenping Ma , Zhenhui Mao , Fangliang Xing , Xin Zhao *
1†
2†
3
1†
4
3
1 Department Radiology-Beijing Children’s Hospital, Capital Medical University, National Center for Children’s Health,
Beijing 100045, China
2 Department of Molecular Neuropathology, Beijing Neurosurgical Institute, Capital Medical University, Beijing, 100070,
China
3 Department Anesthesiology-Beijing Children’s Hospital, Capital Medical University, National Center for Children’s
Health, Beijing 100045, China
4 Beijing Intelligent Entropy Science and Technology Co Ltd., Beijing 100176, China
† These authors contributed equally to this work.

Abstract: It is technically challenging for pediatric anesthesiologists to use bronchial blocker (BB) to isolate the lungs of
infants during thoracoscopic surgery. Further, BB currently sold in the market cannot match the anatomical characteristics of
the infants, especially on the right main bronchus. It may easily cause poor exhaustion of the right upper lobe, which leads
to interference with the thoracoscopic surgical field. The two dimensional reconstruction data of 124 normal infants’ airways
were extracted from the medical image database of Beijing Children’s Hospital for statistical analysis. After using linear
fitting and goodness-of-fit test, a good linear relationship was detected between infant age and various parameters related to
aid in designing a new BB for infants (R =0.502). According to the growth and development rate of infants, the DICOM files
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of airway CT scan of 7 infants aged 30, 60, 90, 120, 180, 270, and 360 days were selected to print non-transparent convex
and transparent concave 3D models. The non-transparent convex model was precisely measured to obtain the important
parameters for BB design infants only, to complete the design of BB, to generate the sample, and to verify the blocking effect
of produced sample in transparent concave three-dimensional (3D) model.
Keywords: Three-dimensional printing; Infant; Bronchial blocker; Airway management

*Correspondence to: Xin Zhao, Beijing Children’s Hospital, Capital Medical University, National Center for Children’s Health, Beijing 100045,
China; zhaoxin@pumch.cams.cn
Received: March 04, 2021; Accepted: March 29, 2022; Published Online: April 29, 2022

Citation: Duan X, Wang W, Ma W, et al., 2022, Convex and concave model 3D printing for designing right-side bronchial blocker for infants,
Int J Bioprint. http://doi.org/10.18063/ijb.v8i3.555

1. Introduction new-style bronchial blocker (BB) [5,6] . Nevertheless, the
BB currently sold in the market cannot nicely match the
When animal experiments fail to satisfy design anatomical characteristics of the infants. The BB is an
requirements or the clinical trials are hard to conduct, important medical consumable for airway management
3D printing can aid in designing medical devices during thoracoscopic surgery and general anesthesia in
and consumables [1-4] . For example, during an infant’s infant patients. BB can block the bronchi of the surgical
thoracoscopic surgery, it is required to block the bronchus side and prevent the contamination of the healthy lung
and collapse the lung of surgery side to generate a full tissues by blood secretions or tumor cells from the
operation field for the operator. However, it is problematic surgical side of the lung. In addition, it may help to drain
for animal models to express these delicate operations. residual air from the surgical side of the lung.
Our 3D printing model will fully display bronchi in There are three key points to consider when
practice to provide reference and guidance for designing designing BB. First, the transverse diameter (TD) of the

© 2022 Author(s). This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, permitting distribution and
reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is cited.
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