The cheap virtual-reality pair of glasses, Google Cardboard, made a miracle surgery possible to save the life of a dying Minnesota baby.
Four-month-old Teegan Lexcen had been born with defects so severe that local doctors had told parents Cassidy and Chad that the case was inoperable. The list of heart defects were daunting: Hypoplastic left heart (a rare defect in which the left heart is severely underdeveloped) hypoplastic aortic arch (blockage of the main conduit of blood from the heart) double outlet right ventricle, mitral atresia, ventricular septal defect, and abnormal pulmonary veins draining to coronary sinus.
In addition, she had no left lung and no left pulmonary artery. The absence of a left lung caused Teegan’s heart to be displaced into her left chest, making it seemingly impossible to plan for the unique challenges of her surgery.
“Teegan had the worst set of defects you can imagine,” Dr. Redmond Burke, the chief of cardiovascular surgery at Nicklaus Children’s Hospital in Miami, told the New York Daily News. “I’ve been doing surgery for 30 years. This is the first time I’ve seen a case like hers.”
Then came a miracle — Teegan's family came across a piece about Burke, who had used cutting edge technology for surgery before, according to Big Think.com. They reached out to him.
What came next was a novel application of the cheap cardboard device that made it possible for doctors to figure out how to repair the defects in ways they could not have done otherwise.
“Dr. Juan-Carlos Muniz, who runs our MRI program, came to me two weeks before surgery and handed me a piece of cardboard with a smartphone in it,” Burke told UploadVR. Muniz had used 3-D publishing software Sketchfab to turn the images of Teegan’s heart and lung into navigable images on his smartphone. “I looked inside and just by tilting my head I could see the patient’s heart. I could turn it. I could manipulate it. I could see it as if I were standing in the operating room.”
In mid-December, Teegan underwent seven-hour open-heart surgery. Here is a video from the Miami Herald:
Burke and his team used donated human heart tissue to rebuild Teegan's aorta, and then connected it to the pulmonary artery. A shunt was put in from the right ventricle to her sole pulmonary artery. Several more operations will be needed to continue to repair the defects, according to a statement by the hospital.
“Teegan was tough,” Burke told the Daily News. “She didn’t slip away. She had a will to live. When you see a kid make it despite lethal defects you start saying ‘This kid’s a survivor.’”
