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(Image: Amanda Voisard)

We’ve had 3D-printed aeroplanes, guns and fossil skulls – but these are the first copies of real human hearts. Constructed from plastic, they are exact anatomical replicas of the hearts of patients with unusual complications.

This one is being held by , a paediatric cardiologist at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington DC, which spent $250,000 on the printer. She says that the replica hearts are ideal for dry runs of complex operations, allowing the surgeon to see beforehand the exact anatomical landscape they will have to navigate.

The heart is created by feeding the printer with two-dimensional data from individual patients’ computerised tomography or ultrasound scans, allowing the machine to build up a replica layer by layer.

The hospital is in the early stages of plans to make real tissue with a 3D printer. Recently, researchers at Cornell University in New York and seeded it with cells from cows. Elsewhere, researchers recently made the world’s first 3D-printed mini human livers.