Case Study: Seattle Children's Hospital achieves confident, personalized surgical planning with Stratasys Digital Anatomy 3D Printing

How Seattle Children's Hospital is employing Stratasys 3D printing to map out complex surgeries, as well as specializing care for individual patients

Seattle Children’s Hospital, a top-ranked pediatric center, faced a high‑risk case: a newborn with severe right bronchial stenosis whose tiny airway made planning and performing a slide tracheoplasty especially challenging. To reduce risk, improve surgical planning, and help families understand the condition, the hospital partnered with Stratasys and used the Stratasys Digital Anatomy 3D Printer to create patient‑specific airway models.

Stratasys printed life‑sized, biomechanically accurate replicas that the multidisciplinary team used for virtual planning and hands‑on rehearsal and that were shared with the family to explain the procedure. Those models boosted surgeon confidence, enabled a rehearsal that contributed to a surgery that went better than anticipated (the infant was the smallest patient at Seattle Children’s to undergo slide tracheoplasty), and improved planning, outcomes, and communication across specialties.

Seattle Children’s Hospital

Kaalan Johnson

Director