Smart heart, don't beat…

In recent years, a huge interest of specialists has been attracted by the bionic heart being developed by the Texas company BiVACOR, which in the near future may become the first viable commercially available replacement for the human heart.

Earlier versions of the artificial heart, providing pulsating blood movement, wore out for several years, which significantly limited the feasibility of their use. The reason for such rapid wear was the constant friction of the device components from each other.

BiVACOR's new artificial heart lasts 10 years longer than its predecessors. This was achieved by minimizing the wear of the parts of the device, which uses a rotating two-sided rotor suspended in a magnetic field for pumping blood. Thus, there are no fasteners and other areas of mechanical contact inside the artificial heart mechanism at all. Unlike existing models, BiVACOR does not simulate the pulsating work of a living heart, but provides constant flows of arterial and venous blood. This practically non-wearing device, whose size is smaller than the size of an adult's heart, has only one moving part and is capable of providing a minute cardiac output more than three times higher than normal, as well as continuously balancing total and pulmonary cardiac emissions offline. The external control unit and the battery are connected to the device using a wire inserted under the skin.

In January, the company's employees successfully implanted an artificial heart in a sheep. According to the founder of BiVACOR, Daniel Timms, who developed the concept of a new artificial heart, now it remains to bring the reliability of the device to a level that would allow it to function in the patient's body.

Evgeniya Ryabtseva
Portal "Eternal youth" http://vechnayamolodost.ru based on Medical Xpress materials:
BiVACOR bionic heart in development in Texas.

16.03.2015