The Tech Review has a great article that I don’t fully understand, about a new type of artificial heart that doesn’t beat. While there are some good artificial hearts on the market, the article states that they’re big, and unwieldy, and you need a large chest cavity to be able to use one (in essence, they’re inappropriate for women). The new continuous flow model, which is considerably smaller, also has much fewer parts, making mechanical wear and tear far less of an issue. Designed by “Bud” Frazier, a prominent heart surgeon and innovator of cardiac devices at the Texas Heart Institute, the continuous flow devices have already been tested on cows.
“You put this in cattle and they stand up and moo and eat and wonder why everyone is looking at them so weird,” says William Cohn, a collaborator on the research and director of minimally invasive surgical technology at the Texas Heart Institute.
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The heartmate II is a little like a turbine except that, instead of the flow of blood generating electricity by turning a propellor, electricty turns the propellor and uses it to drive blood forward. Because the propellor is spinning continuously there is continuous forward flow of blood instead of a pulsatile flow. At the moment it is used as a ventricular assist device that piggybacks along with a patient’s own heart to give it some extra help. By varying the speed of the the propellor you can adjust the amount of work done by the patient’s heart relative to the machine. When the propellor is going at full speed all of the blood flow will come from the device and the patient does, indeed, have no pulse. They have a nice mechanical hum, though.
posted by doctor in training on 9-22-2006 at 2:05 pm
In fact, there’s even a video at this website:
http://www.columbiasurgery.org/pat/lvad/options.html
posted by doctor in training on 9-22-2006 at 2:13 pm
crazy! thanks for the added info…
posted by Mangesh on 9-22-2006 at 2:16 pm