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Medicine Science Technology

Maglev Heart Could Keep Cardiac Patients Alive 49

Posted by BeauHD from the new-and-improved dept.
Bivacor is working toward human trials of their artificial heart after the implant successfully kept a calf alive for 90-days, helping it stay healthy, energetic, and gain weight at a normal rate. It even jogged on a treadmill for 30-minute stretches. Artificial hearts have been discussed among cardiac surgeons and biomedical engineers for more than 50 years, but what makes Bivacor's artificial heart so unique is its use of a levitating disk, suspended in a magnetic field, that spins 2,000 times per minute to keep blood flowing. IEEE Spectrum reports: We had to overcome many technical challenges to make an artificial heart that's small, biocompatible, energy efficient, and durable. Consider that the human heart beats about 112,000 times a day, which adds up to 42 million times a year, and you'll understand the magnitude of the challenge. We've tested the Bivacor heart in 15 cows so far. While the need for animal testing is unfortunate, it's the only way to prove the device's safety and move forward to clinical trials in humans. These Corriente calves, which are relatively small, are the right size to serve as analogues for adult patients. We've also implanted the Bivacor heart in several sheep, which are more representative of patients with smaller bodies, including children. Our tests have shown that the heart holds up well: With its one moving part levitating in a magnetic field, there's no worry that friction and mechanical wear will cause the machine to give out. Our tests have also shown that the device can adapt to the user's cardiovascular requirements.

The Bivacor heart would fit in the palm of your hand -- it's about 650 grams, slightly heavier than an adult human heart. Its shell is made of titanium, a noncorroding material that almost never triggers an immune response. Patients will wear a 4-kg external controller pack that contains two rechargeable batteries (providing about 5 hours of operation each), although they can also plug in directly to a power outlet. Throughout our design process, we used 3D printers to make both titanium and plastic parts for our prototypes, allowing us to rapidly experiment with different geometries. For testing, we built a hardware simulation of the human circulatory system in our engineering office in Los Angeles; this mock-up allows us to validate a device's function thoroughly and repeatedly in a controlled environment, and reduces the need for animal testing.
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Maglev Heart Could Keep Cardiac Patients Alive More

Maglev Heart Could Keep Cardiac Patients Alive

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  • I really love how they are applying MagLev tech to the heart. Let's just hope it doesn't have any "stops" along the way, get it?

    Soon will be the days of 3D printed hearts, maybe we can even get one for Donald Trump, lol.

    -Beau

  • So no pulse? (Score:3)

    by goombah99 ( 560566 ) on Thursday August 22, 2019 @09:41PM (#59114708)

    SOmehow I think not having a pulse might drive you insane or mess up a lot of things. One interesting fact about your own pulse is that you can't hear it in part because your brain edits it out.

    • I wonder, would you hear a "ghost pulse" for a while as your brain strives to erase something no longer there? I think I'd pick that over dropping dead though.

      But then, there's no reason a flow pump still couldn't be pulsed. In fact... yep, down the article a ways it says they're experimenting with just that.

    • Re:So no pulse? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Vanyle ( 5553318 ) on Thursday August 22, 2019 @11:07PM (#59114874)
      I worked with a doctor many many years ago in development of an artificial heart. It was of a similar design but one of the reasons they had to shut the project down was the lack of a pulse. The body does strange things when you remove something as important as a pulse.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • I worked with a doctor many many years ago in development of an artificial heart. It was of a similar design but one of the reasons they had to shut the project down was the lack of a pulse. The body does strange things when you remove something as important as a pulse.

        From TFA:

        The pump can run at constant speed, producing continuous blood flow at a constant pressure, and in our early experiments we concentrated on testing this “pulseless” mode. But it’s easy to change its speed, and our later experiments proved that controlled speed changes could produce a wide range of flow and pressure characteristics. Running the pump first at high speed (sending out more blood) and then at low speed (sending out less) creates something resembling a biological heart

    • Dick Cheney had an artificial heart for 15 months, and he's just fine...

      • Dick Cheney had an artificial heart for 15 months, and he's just fine...

        Well... he's still alive anyway -- surviving on unicorn blood.

    • TFA says they have added a "pulsatile" output mode which simulates a pulse by alternating high speed and low speed, so they can research whether lack of a pulse is in fact a problem.

      • a pulse is literally a pulse not a slow variation.

        • It may well be that a slow pulse will do the job. We know a pulse is needed, but we don't try know what other kinds of pulse might suffice

    • There are already patients with effectively no pulse who use certain heart assist devices. Dick Cheney famously does not have one.

      https://www.livescience.com/33... [livescience.com]

    • Is that why I can't find my own pulse when trying to check it via my wrist and throat?

  • It sounds like a Cyberpunk song title: "You can't crash my maglev heart!"

    • It sounds like a Cyberpunk song title: "You can't crash my maglev heart!"

      Or that one by Billy Ray Cyrus, "No-Achy No-Breaky Heart"

  • I'll take the pig one (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Thank you very much. No need to turn myself into a wall wart

  • Redundancy (Score:5, Informative)

    by djinn6 ( 1868030 ) on Thursday August 22, 2019 @10:06PM (#59114770)

    With its one moving part levitating in a magnetic field, there's no worry that friction and mechanical wear will cause the machine to give out.

    If any part of me were to become cyborg, I'd like triple redundancy at least.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by xlsior ( 524145 )

      With its one moving part levitating in a magnetic field, there's no worry that friction and mechanical wear will cause the machine to give out.

      If any part of me were to become cyborg, I'd like triple redundancy at least.

      And you thought it sucked when you forgot to charge your cellphone...

      • Cue scene of Futurama robot that was powered by a water wheel, and was regularly running into the ocean in order to stay alive. Five hour batteries don't provide much leeway if the heart can never be allowed to fail.

        For long term use, an artificial heart that runs on chemicals available in the blood is needed.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Zmobie ( 2478450 )

      Imagine power outages... People's heart could literally stop if they don't get it back on in time...

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        They should make this thing tritium powered so you never run out of power and don't have life critical power cables coming out of your butt.

      • Imagine power outages... People's heart could literally stop if they don't get it back on in time...

        Perhaps they could use a treadmill to generate electricity to power their heart.
        Would bring new meaning to the exclamation, "Run for your life!"

        • I was thinking hand crank, but yeah... some sort of manual mode.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by necro81 ( 917438 )

          Perhaps they could use a treadmill to generate electricity to power their heart.

          I was expecting you would get a bunch of armchair pedants decrying this notion as breaking some law of physics. But when you consider it, the amount of power it takes to run a heart (biological or artificial) is much less than the amount of power that the functioning heart enables a body to produce. A reasonably fit person can produce 75-100 W almost indefinitely; the heart requires much less.

    • And more than 10 hours run time. What if you oversleep?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      I'd take rigorous testing. It's not like my heart has triple redundancy anyway.

      Besides, I expect most people getting them won't actually have much of a choice - it's a roboheart or hope for a transplant.

    • not to worry, its only going to keep you alive until you receive your tailor-grown pig heart.
  • The technical challenges where back in the days of the perfusion pump in the mid 1930's.
    The Lindbergh-Carrel mechanical heart.
    Alexis Carrel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • More evolutionary than revolutionary (Score:4, Informative)

    by NigelTheFrog ( 1292406 ) on Friday August 23, 2019 @02:45AM (#59115224)
    This is the same technology that’s been used in left ventricular assist devices for awhile. The Thoratec HeartMate 3 even has the artificial “pulse” that this describes. Both the HeartMate 3 and HeartWare’s HVAD use magnetically levitated rotors in a centrifugal pump. The big difference here is that this is a whole-heart replacement, not just an assist device for the left heart. All of the current total artificial hearts are pneumatically powered and very loud. They’re also only used as a bridge to transplant, which I assume this would be too.

    • True. Artificial hearts haven't been very successful yet, but thousands of people have received ventricular assist devices [wikipedia.org], usually as a temporary bridge to transplantation. (Sadly, the Wikipedia article is seriously out of date.)

      Use of magnetic levitation is interesting, but mechanical wear isn't one of the most common problems with VADs. The problems are usually biological: blood clots, bleeding, infection, kidney failure.

  • i was excited to read the summary until the end, where it requires a dual battery pack weighing 4kg that only lasts 5 hours.

    oh, who am i kidding, i'm still excited a spinning disk at 2k rpm, what's not to love? :)

    • Given the option of dying from heart failure or a mechanical heart with a 5 hour 4kg power pack, which would you prefer?

      If it's the difference between living and dying I'll carry an gas powered generator around with me.

  • Magnetic field? (Score:3)

    by twocows ( 1216842 ) on Friday August 23, 2019 @08:09AM (#59115820)
    How are they accounting for the presence of external sources of magnetic disruption, like magnetic material or other strong magnets? I'm sure they've considered the question, I'm just curious.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Xenna ( 37238 )

      It's probably a bad idea to have an MRI with this device in your chest...

    • Magnetic force decreases more or less in proportion to the square of distance, so it would take a very strong magnetic field to disrupt the motor. There are electromagnetic motors all over the place: computer hard disk drives, washing machines, fans, microwave ovens, etc., etc. How often do those fail due to interference from other magnets? (Most of these don't use magnetic levitation, except for some hard drives, but the principle is the same.)

      I'd be somewhat more concerned about radio-frequency interferen

  • "Patients will wear a 4-kg external controller pack that contains two rechargeable batteries (providing about 5 hours of operation each), although they can also plug in directly to a power outlet."

    I am assuming they mean the battery charger and NOT the person!

    Does the heart itself have an internal power source? I'd hate to be the guy who pulls his own plug while tossing and turning at night.

    • Given such a large external pack only provides 5 hours of power, any internal source would only be able to provide a couple of minutes.

  • Well I had respect for titanium until it came out yesterday that Apple's titanium credit cards would shrivel up and melt like a snowflake if brought near exotic materials such as denim and leather. Apple's titanium credit cards require regular maintenance and cleaning with alcohol wipes.

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