Funding outcome

Babies can be born with heart abnormalities, referred to as congenital heart disease (CHD), which are the most common type of abnormality seen in newborn babies. Severe CHD can be life-threatening to babies if not treated with surgery in the first few days, weeks, or months of life. The abnormalities are complex and often difficult for families to understand. Currently, the best way to explain these diseases to families is to draw them a 2-dimensional picture or provide them with pre-printed diagrams of the heart disease. Previous research has shown that many parents of children with CHD have a hard time understanding the heart disease, including not being able to name or describe what is wrong with their child's heart. The 3D Heart Project is a local group at the University of Alberta that has been working to make 3D models of CHD from scans of a patient's heart, specifically MRI and CT scans. These 3D models let you hold, move, and manipulate the model to help see and understand the heart anatomy. We can create 3D models for many of the most common types of severe CHD seen in newborn babies. We want to see if using these heart models, and comparing them side-by-side to a 3D model of the typical or 'normal' heart, will help families to more easily understand what is wrong with their child's heart. We would also like to give the families a model of the same type of CHD that their baby has to see if this helps the family to understand their child's heart disease, explain it to others, and have conversations with their doctors.