“It’s very useful for doctors and surgeons to practice when the heart is still beating, especially for minimally invasive surgery,” said Kaiyan Qiu, Berry Family Assistant Professor, School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering, and corresponding author on the paper.

“In our case, this model is the first fully synthetic model that, without any assistance of animal models, mimics the complete left side of the heart. We were able to incorporate both the anatomic features and the dynamic functions.”