Cloacal repair is a rare and delicate surgical procedure that many pediatric surgeons will never encounter in their lifetime. UC Davis pediatric surgeon Payam Saadai specializes in this type of surgery and is committed to helping children born with a cloaca to have the best possible future. Using 3D models created at the 3D PrintViz Lab on the UC Davis Health campus in Sacramento, surgical teams have been able to plan cloacal surgeries like never before. These models provide a veritable road map that makes all the difference. One in 50,000 girls are born with a cloaca, which is a rare, congenital malformation in which the genital tract, the urinary tract and the colorectal or intestinal tract end together in one channel, instead of being three separate structures.
UC Davis 3D PrintViz Lab: https://health.ucdavis.edu/3dprintviz/
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the procedure's called acoustical repair. Um And the underlying disorder that we're trying to fix is called a clue waka. This is a really rare congenital malformation. And what happens is that the general track the urinary tract and the colorectal or gastrointestinal tract are supposed to be three separate structures. Um And what happens with the coca is that all three of those structures end together in one channel. We call that a common channel. Uh And this happens very early in embryology when the baby is still in the womb. Uh And those three different channels don't form um separately. And so the procedure is a very delicate procedure to try to reconstruct all three of those channels so that the baby girl will have a separate place for her urethra, a separate place for her vagina in a separate place for her rectum or anus. Because it's such a delicate surgery. You want to be as prepared as possible. You don't want any surprises. You want to know every single possibility um in advance. Yeah. So our lab is the three D. Print visits. Lab stands for three D. Printing and visualization lab. My role is to create an exact three d replica of this deformity to help the surgeons better understand and visualize this complex deformity plan for the surgery, anticipate complications and avoid this complications. There's a collaboration that we have with the three D. Printing team here where they send us computerized renderings of what they've built. We can give them feedback. We can make adjustments. We've actually been able to go see um some of the prototypes and been able to give them real time feedback and say, hey, this part needs to be, you know, thicker. This part needs to be a different color and they've been able to make adjustments. We found that with the three D quick program, we get the best imaging we can possibly get and in fact to get a model, a three D model of what, how those things come together. So then we can then plan the surgery and how we're gonna do the reconstruction and separation of those structures so that the girl has the best potential outcome long term. These cases are usually very complex cases that require a lot of research to make sure that we were doing the right print also that we have to make sure that it's an exact replica. So there's a lot of quality assurance that goes into that. This will define the approach of the surgery and which surgery is going to be done. So it's very important to be very meticulous with the quality of the, of the print. So what we would normally do with a ct scan or an x ray that we pull that up on a monitor and look at that and review that during an operation. We're actually doing that with the actual model in certain cases actually helped us change the operation and operative plan because of that three D model and through that three D reconstruction Davis has been for many reasons. Just such an incredible place to be able to put all this expertise together and create a center like this. Um And there's been nothing more rewarding than to see kids who have struggled for years or decades sometimes um and be able to help them um and be able to actually offer a different quality of life when they were told years ago that this was just how things were going to be. Mm hmm, mm hmm, mm hmm.
