The BiVACOR Total Artificial Heart: a Maglev Bridge to Life

-
The BiVACOR THA hooked up with the CTO Dianiel Timms in the background. (Credit: BiVACOR)
The BiVACOR THA hooked up with the CTO Dianiel Timms in the background. (Credit: BiVACOR)

Outside of the brain, the heart is probably the organ that you miss the most when it ceases to function correctly. Unfortunately, as we cannot grow custom replacement hearts yet, we have to keep heart patients alive long enough for them to receive a donor heart. Yet despite the heart being essentially a blood pump, engineering even a short-term artificial replacement has been a struggle for many decades. A new contender has now arrived in the BiVACOR TAH (total artificial heart), which just had the first prototype implanted in a human patient.

Unlike the typical membrane-based pumps, the BiVACOR TAH is a rotary pump that uses an impeller-based design with magnetic levitation replacing bearings and theoretically minimizing damage to the blood. This design should also mean a significant flowrate, enough even for an exercising adult. Naturally, this TAH is only being tested as a bridge-to-transplant solution, for patients with a failing heart who do not qualify for a ventricular assist device. This may give more heart patients a chance to that donor heart transplant, even if a TAH as a destination therapy could save so many more lives.

The harsh reality is that the number of donor hearts decreases each year while demand increases, leading to unconventional approaches like xenotransplantation using specially bred pigs as donor, as well as therapeutic cloning to grow a new heart from the patient’s own cells. Having a universal TAH that could be left in-place (destination therapy) for decades would offer a solid option next to the latter, but remains elusive. As shown by e.g. the lack of progress with a TAH like the ReinHeart despite a promising 2014 paper in a bovine model.

Hopefully before long we’ll figure out a reliable way to fix this ‘just a blood pump’ in our bodies, regardless of whether it’s a biological or mechanical solution.



from Blog – Hackaday https://ift.tt/KISWefR

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Modern Radio Receiver Architecture: From Regenerative to Direct Conversion

-
Image
Modern radio receivers have a distinct advantage over the common early designs which I covered in my previous article . Most of the receivers you will have worked with over the past couple decades are designs by Edwin Armstrong ; regenerative, superregenerative, or most commonly superheterodyne. These are distinguished by a few fascinating key traits that bring both benefits and drawbacks. Today let’s dive into Mr. Armstrong’s receivers. I’ll also talk about DC receivers which, despite the name, are not made to listen to batteries. These are receivers you are much more likely to encounter in modern equipment. Regenerative and Superregenerative The regenerative receiver is all about doing more with less. You still see some of these in simple applications like RF remote controls. The idea derives from how an oscillator works. In a simple way of thinking, an oscillator is an amplifier with enough positive feedback that any tiny signal at the right frequency will amplify and then, throu...
Get this one»

Hackaday Links: May 31, 2020

-
We begin with sad news indeed as we mark the passing of Marcel van Kervinck on Monday. The name might not ring a bell, but his project, the Gigatron TTL computer , certainly will. We did a deep dive on the microprocessor-less computer a while back, and Marcel was a regular at conferences and on the Gigatron forums, supporting users and extending what the computer can do. He was pretty candid about his health issues, and I’ll add that when I approached him a few weeks ago out of the blue about perhaps doing a Hack Chat about Gigatron, he was brutally honest about how little time he had left and that he wouldn’t make it that long. I was blown away by the grace and courage he displayed. His co-conspirator Walter Belger will carry on the Gigatron mission, including joining us for a Hack Chat on June 24. In the meantime, this might be a great time to pick up a Gigatron kit before they’re all sold out and get busy soldering all those delicious through-hole TTL chips. May of 2020 is the mo...
Get this one»

Homebrew 68K Micro-ATX Computer Runs Its Own OS

-
Image
We’re no stranger to home built Motorola 68000 computers here at Hackaday, but more often than not, they tend to be an experiment in retro minimalism. The venerable processor is usually joined by only a handful of components, and there’s an excellent chance they’ll have taken up residence on a piece of perfboard. Then [NotArtyom] sent in his Blitz , and launched the bar into the stratosphere. Make no mistake, the Blitz isn’t just some simple demo of classic chips. The open hardware motherboard has onboard floppy, IDE, and PS/2 interfaces, with a trio of 8-bit ISA expansion slots for good measure. The  Motorola 68030 CPU is humming along at 50 MHz, with 4 MB of RAM and 512 KB of ROM along for the ride. Designed to fit the Micro-ATX motherboard standard, you can even mount the Blitz in a contemporary PC case and run it on a standard ATX power supply. An earlier prototype of the Blitz motherboard. As if the hardware wasn’t impressive enough, [NotArtyom] went ahead and created hi...
Get this one»