Researchers Create Artificial Windpipe Using 3D Printer, Save Infant's Life (VIDEO)

Doctors have saved the life of a 20-month-old boy with the help of a specially-designed dissolvable splint.

The child, Kaiba, was suffering from a rare medical condition known as tracheobronchomalacia (TBM), or dynamic airway collapse during breathing or coughing. According to the reports, about one in 2,200 newborns in the country is affected with the condition, and most of them fully recover from it by age 2 or 3.

Kaiba, who was five months premature by birth, started exhibiting breathing and feeding difficulties shortly after completing his first month. Later, when the infant started struggling to take normal breaths, he was placed under ventilator. Doctors detected abnormalities in the boy's arteries - they overlapped each other and one was extremely large. Apart from that, his airway walls were very delicate, making them collapse during his normal breathing process, Health Day reported.

A device developed by scientists at the University of Michigan came to the infant's help. Dr. Glenn Green and Scott Hollister used a CT scan of Kaiba's bronchus to develop a 3-D printed trachea from a biopolymer known as polycaprolactone. Through a surgery conducted at C.S. Mott Children's Hospital, the FDA-approved splint was inserted into Kaiba's body.

According to a report published in the New England Journal of Medicine, since February 2012, Kaiba has been breathing with the help of the splint attached to his airway and within the next two or three years, it will be fully dissolved into the boy's body.

"It was amazing. As soon as the splint was put in, the lungs started going up and down for the first time and we knew he was going to be OK," Green said in a news release.

"The material we used is a nice choice for this. It takes about two to three years for the trachea to remodel and grow into a healthy state, and that's about how long this material will take to dissolve into the body," Hollister added.

Kaiba has fully recovered from the condition and is now staying with his parents April and Bryan Gionfriddo in Ohio.

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