Man with artificial heart survives over 100 days outside hospital Australian company BiVACOR has revealed a patient implanted with its artificial heart survived for 100 days – and is still with us after receiving a donated organ. The un-named man had heart disease that meant he needed a replacement ticker. BiVACOR makes just such a replacement that it calls the “Total Artificial Heart” (TAH …
This is impressive. What a heart does is pretty straightforward in engineering terms, so any breakthrough in materials science/tribology could lead to something more practical and longer-lasting than a human heart transplant, which comes with all manner of risks and complications.
"All artificial hearts last a lifetime. It's in the guarantee! The clever bit is making that lifetime a long one."
All biological hearts last a lifetime. It's in the guarantee! The difficult bit is that the duration of the guarantee period is not known in advance… ;-)
What a heart does is pretty straightforward in engineering terms
True, but we still struggle to build any sort of pump for any purpose that can continue to operate for a decade without interruption, let alone without regular maintenance (which would be undesirable, if it meant having to get your chest cut open every year)
Absolutely brilliant biomedical engineering. From the model the two sides of the heart have separate rotary pumps for the different pressures required for the lung (low impedance) cf the body (high impedance) - clearly the flows are identical.
I would be curious whether after things have settled down you would notice not having a pulse. Or indeed there are any pathologies associated with the absence of a pulse.
I suspect we will be able to culture replacement hearts long before we will be able to construct mechanical hearts which have MTBF of the biblical three score and ten.
Yeah, Dick Cheney famously had a centrifugal left-ventricular assist device (LVAD) implanted that left him pulseless for almost 2 years until a transplant was available. Back then, the NYT wrote: "patients feel nothing unusual. But they are urged to [...] alert emergency room doctors as to why they have no pulse".
Indeed, the shear of red blood cells (that reduces their O₂-carrying capacity) is the challenge for centrifugal blood pumps iirc, while "volume displacement pumps" have challenges with valves (where clotting may occur). I have to guess that this here design is made to prevent excess shear while providing those 12 L/min (so that it works right).
The use of MAGLEV tech in this BiVACOR TAH is also quite neat imho (as long as you don't carry your credit cards in a left-chest pocket ...)!
Harkonnen Industries are undoubtedly working on a 'plug-and-play' version as we speak: the perfect product to be sold to American (or Imperium) citizens who potentially might not pay their private medical bills [1] (oh, did we mention that plug-and-play means it is unplug-and-unplay as well?)…
[1] «rolls eyes (albeit with some sympathy) in most-of-the-rest-of-the-developed-world-speak»
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