What to you do if a doctor says your heart's aortic root had ballooned to nearly two inches, and that a heart attack is imminent unless you receive a mechanical valve--a fix that requires blood-thinning drugs for the rest of one's life? Easy--just invent your own heart implant. This was the scenario facing Tal Golesworthy in 2000. An engineer from Tewkesbury, England, Golesworthy has the same tissue disorder that afflicts over 12,000 people in the UK: Marfan syndrome. But Golesworthy decided that the valve wasn't his only option. As The Engineer reports:
What excited him was the use of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and computer-aided design (CAD). He believed that by combining these technologies with rapid prototyping (RP) techniques he could manufacture a tailor-made support that would act as an internal bandage to keep his aorta in place.... "It seemed to me to be pretty obvious that you could scan ...
