February is Heart Month, and groundbreaking technology at Norton Children’s Hospital is helping surgeons go inside a child’s heart before ever picking up a scalpel.
Eighteen-month-old Harriet Elzey, who goes by Hattie, doesn’t look like a child who once faced nearly impossible odds. Before Hattie and her twin brother were born, doctors made a devastating discovery during her mother Dakota’s 20-week anatomy scan.
“They first found out that her stomach was on the wrong side of her body and then with that diagnosis usually comes a lot of cardiovascular issues,” Dakota said.
Hattie was diagnosed with heterotaxy syndrome, a rare condition where organs form in the wrong places or positions along with multiple heart defects.
“Each one we would have considered, you know, a serious heart condition. So she had, three different serious heart conditions within one. You know, patient,” said Dr. Mark McDonald, medical director at Norton Children’s.
Each condition alone could require surgery and together made Hattie’s heart especially difficult to repair.
That’s where cutting-edge technology called surgical theater comes in. Norton Children’s is one of only a few children’s hospitals nationwide using it for pediatric heart patients, adapting technology designed for brain surgery.
“It creates a very detailed and very focused 3D images of the heart that we can look at from different angles, rotate, focus, enlarge and examine in a much better way than the traditional way of doing it,” said heart surgeon Dr. Bahaaldin Alsouf.
The technology allows surgeons to go inside a virtual model of the heart, rehearsing complex repairs before the real operation.
“You can actually put on virtual reality goggles that we’re all familiar with and walk into the heart and go into the heart and look at the valves, see how they’re put together,” McDonald said.
Right before Christmas, surgeons performed an incredibly complex repair of Hattie’s heart, a surgery that lasted nearly seven hours.
“Congenital heart disease is lifelong, so you know she wasn’t cured, she wasn’t fixed, but it definitely gave her a lot of a better outlook and a better quality of life for sure,” Dakota said.
Now, Hattie is home, thriving and showing the world what’s possible when innovation and expertise come together.
“Thank you doesn’t feel big enough you know my appreciation, it goes beyond words,” Dakota said.
Norton says technology like this is funded by donations and fundraising through the Norton Children’s Hospital foundation.
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Project CommUNITY: Norton Children's using groundbreaking technology to repair heart conditions – WLKY
