Dr Chen Ching Kit is a consultant paediatric cardiologist at KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH). He is also an adjunct assistant professor with the Department of Paediatrics at the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore and the Duke-NUS Medical School. Dr Chen graduated with a Bachelor of Medicine and Surgery from the National University of Singapore, and pursued post-graduate training in paediatrics and paediatric cardiology at KKH. He underwent two years of fellowship in paediatric heart failure and heart transplantation at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada. Upon returning to Singapore after his fellowship, Dr Chen started the paediatric advanced heart failure programme (including mechanical circulatory support for children) in KKH and is currently working towards establishing a paediatrics heart transplant program in Singapore.

Dr Chen’s other areas of interest and expertise includes exercise echocardiography, fetal cardiology and 3D printing of heart models. A recipient of the Philip Witchel Memorial Research Fellowship in Pediatric Heart Failure 2013 (Canada), Dr Chen’s current research interests include dilated cardiomyopathy, exercise testing and exercise echocardiography in cardiomyopathy and congenital heart diseases, and antibodies in paediatric heart transplantation.

Presentation Synopsis
Delivering Benefits for Patients and Hospitals through 3D Innovation
Three-dimensional printing has found its niche applications in the medicine of congenital heart diseases. Congenital heart diseases causing significant haemodynamic and functional consequences require surgical repair. Understanding the precise surgical anatomy is often challenging and can be inadequate or inaccurate. The diagnosis and management of structural and congenital heart disease has historically been driven largely by two-dimensional (2D) imaging such as ultrasound / echocardiography and cardiac MRI. However, congenital heart disease is a 3D problem, so 2D imaging methods often lack critical spatial information. The advancement of 3D printing technology has enabled us to examine the heart, a 3D structure, in an actual 3D format, which can be held in our hands; this is more useful in relaying anatomy than simply trying to imagine the structure from 2D images.

Compared to adults, children have much smaller chest cavities, which render their hearts to be significantly smaller than an adult’s heart. In addition, the complexity of certain congenital heart defects makes congenital heart surgery more challenging in comparison to an adult heart surgery. There are many challenges operating on tiny hearts and good pre-surgical planning work is critical to enhance success and to achieve optimal patient outcomes. While our pre-surgical work was previously guided by hands-on experience, these 3D print heart models have enabled us to be more efficient and precise, especially in cases with complex anatomies. Three-dimensional innovation has indeed made a small revolution in teaching and surgical practice, improving outcomes for patients and optimising efficiency for the hospital.