Brain surgery innovation: Practice on a 3-D model

There's a fair chance that Teresa Flint is alive today and around for her three kids because her doctors failed to fix her brain aneurysm the first few times they took a crack at it. That's because those initial attempts by Flint's surgeons were made on a 3-D printed replica of her complex, potentially fatal aneurysm instead of actually inside the head of the 49-year-old Buffalo, New York-area resident. The dry runs on Flint's tangled aneurysm were done on a model printed by an "Eden 260V," an $87,000 3-D printer made by Stratasys Ltd.