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Science

Completely Artificial Hearts Approved 20

Posted by michael from the perfect-valentine's-day-gift dept.
DarrylM writes: "From CBC's web page: 'The first people to have completely artificial hearts could be walking around by July . . . The new artificial hearts fit right into the chest cavity, with a battery pack positioned in the recipient's thorax. The designers said they wanted patients to show no external sign they had an artificial heart.'" Hmmm. I thought the Jarvik-7 was the first artificial heart...
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Completely Artificial Hearts Approved More

Completely Artificial Hearts Approved

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  • oh.... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    skanky!

  • Jarvik 7 was First! (Score:4)

    by Schwarzchild ( 225794 ) on Thursday February 01, 2001 @08:09PM (#462697)
    Yeah the Jarvik was the first completely artificial heart to be used by a human, but unfortunately Barney Clark did not survive. I understand that they tried using the Jarvik 7 a few more times after that but the patients kept dying after a few months. They finally gave up on that design and resorted to a different concept, that of, making helper pumps. These are not replacements for the heart. They are implanted next to the heart and help the diseased heart to pump. Apparently, they can help the diseased heart to become more healthy by relieving the amount of work that has to be done. I think Dr. Jarvik is now working on these "helper pumps". It seemed that the completely artificial heart was technically infeasible at this time but who knows how successful this new artificial heart might be?

  • Re:Jarvik 7 was First! (Score:3)

    by TWX_the_Linux_Zealot ( 227666 ) on Thursday February 01, 2001 @08:41PM (#462698) Journal
    What about Jarviks one through six?

    "Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."
  • I thought the first 5 were sabotaged before completion, and the sixth vanished without a trace?
    ___

  • battery life (Score:3)

    by AndyChrist ( 161262 ) <<andy_christ> <at> <yahoo.com>> on Thursday February 01, 2001 @10:23PM (#462700) Homepage
    1 and a half HOURS?

    Gee, you could have a race between your heart and your notebook, see which runs out of juice first.
  • No, no. Jarvik has hearts 1-6 planed out, but first he must release the Jarvik 7 Special Edition, then completely disenfrancise an entire generation by including a goofy cartoon in Jarviks 1-6. :-)
  • "Quit playing games with my heart...."
  • There is a vast (many orders of magnitude) difference between the amount of power required for a pacemaker and for an artificial heart.

    A pacemaker sends a very tiny signal to existing heart muscle to trigger it to contract. At this late hour I'll abstain from the actual calculations, but the signals are transmitted for brief periods of time (milliseconds) at small voltages (~100 mv) and represent an incredibly small amount of power. Even a tiny lithium battery can run a pacemaker for ten years.

    A heart, on the other hand, must do the mechanical work to pump large volumes of liquid at fairly high pressures. The required power is roughly what you need to run a small cordless power tool continuously. How long will your drill run non-stop? One could make a twenty-hour battery, but it would probably weigh a significant fraction of the patient's body weight (say, 10 or 20 kilograms), which would defeat the entire purpose of this device.

    I guess you could use plutonium to build an RTG (radioisotope thermal generator) like those on most deep-space probes; that would have enough power to run it for a couple of months. But it would be huge, and the amount of plutonium required would be unhealthy...

  • LVAD (Left Ventricular Assist Device) is what he's talking about. They're usually used, as you would guess, on pretty sick people, or during/after a cardiac bypass to help out. It's basically a fancy inflating/deflating balloon in the aorta (main blood veessel coming out of the heart). They make a cool wssst -pssssht noise.

    The problem with the artificial hearts was blood clots. This remains to be a problem with any artificial valve used today and so people need to take coumadin (warfarin, aka rat poison) to thin their blood.

    Transplants still work the best. I dont think that engineers have come up with any pumps with a MTBF of approx 70 years and 2.7 BILLION cycles.
    Mother nature+Evolution = still the best..

  • LOLOL

    Yes that could indeed cause an entirely new spectrum of problems. Not to mention that it would probably be very HEAVY. :)

    I am trying to imagine something like a personal Topaz reactor. And of course the armed guards to make certain no one tries to abscond with the power supply. %)

    In any case I do feel 1.5 hours is inadequate for long-term use of the device. I suspect it might be a decent stop-gap measure, and it is certainly less cumbersome than the air-powered ventricular assist devices that are out now.

  • I'm not sure that it is called that. The pump I'm talking about that is the current rave is basically composed of a cylinder with a small screw-like turbine that pushes the blood past it. No balloon type device is involved that I can remember.

    I think they've come up with a new technique to get around the blood clotting problem by smearing the interior of such devices with a sticky finely ground sand that they then expose to blood and allow it to clot. The clotted blood is now firmly glued to interior of the device and I think that is supposed to reduce further risk of clots in the device making their way to vulnerable areas.

  • Those "rolling blackouts" in California suddenly become a lot more interesting. I guess the first thing you're gonna wanna do is get yourself the best uninterruptible power supply on the market.
  • There was a flash fire aboard the Jarvik-1 which killed all crew members, and the next 5 Jarviks were unmanned tests.


    Packing someone's chest with tons of explosives and putting people on top will never become routine. I think we should all remember those who have given there lives so that we could achieve these milestones of the 20th century.

  • If the battery life is only one and a half hours, it doesn't seem like this artificial heart will suceed in much besides keeping people alive in hospital beds.

    Better than dying perhaps, but not really an adequate solution to heart disease.

    Isn't it possible to position lithium batteries in the human body so that they will constantly re-power themseleves?
  • I guess this gives a new meaning to the expression "battery life". I can just see a coroner stating "This man has a dead battery."

    Seems like a great hacking target for terrorists: "If you don't fork over 6 umpzillion dollars in 12 hours, we will activate a high-powered EMP that will stop every artificial heart within a 70-mile radius."

    Disclaimer: i'm not a terrorist, just a harmless paranoid sicko.

  • Penn State made it (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What it dosn't metion nor does the companies web sight is that the heart was made by penn state and is being developed for market with them. At the schools Hersey medical center they currently have a cow with one in it. It's name is "two close to call" since it was suppose to be named after the winning of the presidental election but at the tiem of its birth it hadn't been decided. Its a shame for PSU that they get no credit.

  • are very widely used for pacemakers to give them a life of ten years or more. I do not understand why such a short-lived battery would be used in a device like this.

    If Uncle Fred gets too far away from the inductive recharger he's history. What happens if the charging pad slips in the middle of the night? What happens if he lives in California?

    An hour and a half is not a very long window for such an intensely critical device.

    I hope this is only the first in what will be a long series of devices whose abilities will progressively improve. If roaming times do not improve then an artificial heart will replace a condition that was a death sentence with a new condition, a boredom sentence.

    I think twenty hours of operation per charge should be a minimum desirable goal for any device that would be widely deployed, with even longer periods between recharges required within a set time period by regulating agencies.

    In the meantime, I commend researchers who invent alternatives to ever-scarce donor organs. I guess until we can make new organs easily boredom is preferable to death?

  • It was first, but was inferior to the artificial heart in the story referenced above, because there were all sorts of tubes and wires that had to poke out the patient's chest to connect the heart to a lot of machinery outside. The story is saying this one is totally internal...
  • Looks like another 'beating human heart done in plastic' despite the fact that a small impeller in a tube is as effective and only a fraction of the size. Doctors make lousy engineers.
  • Engineers make lousy doctors. The problem with an impeller (or most other conventional pumping methods) is that it makes tons of blood clots. These proceed to wreak havoc in the body.

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