There are more than twenty-five million human beings in the world suffering from heart failure and there's a worrying shortage of donors to help them. As the use of blood pumps to supplement or fully substitute the working of a heart seems not to be an optimal method for this kind of medical assistance, scientists and doctoral students at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have been working on developing an artificial heart to use it as a more sophisticated alternative.
The goal was to "to develop an artificial heart that is roughly the same size as the patient’s own one and which imitates the human heart as closely as possible in form and function" and the team has so far been successful in this endeavor. The artificial heart they came up with is made out of 3D printed silicone, weighs slightly less than four hundred grams and has a volume of six hundred and eighty cubic centimeters. It has both left and right ventricle, but it's not separated by a septum like a natural human heart, but by an additional chamber that is stimulated by pressurized air to simulate the muscle contraction of the normal heart.
The one problem with this particular model of the artificial heart is that it lasts only for about three thousand beats before it breaks under the pressure of the beating strain. Nonetheless, as the model works and moves in a way almost identical to the real deal, the team's objective has been accomplished. The next step for the researchers in and out of this team is to enhance this model by improving the performance and tensile strength of the material. It's great to get a glimpse into the fascinating future of medicine and to think about possibilities to treat and prevent disease, as well as to enhance lives of human beings.
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