Medical and Materials Issues of the Total Artificial Heart
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It really is my pleasure to be here and talk with you because I think that the future of my field is really your field. Those of you here will really be the ones who determine what we in the medical field can do, and how much of what we can do will be the discussion we'll have in the future. I'd like to speak a little bit about something that's been dear to my heart for about 20 years now and that is the development of a total artificial heart. I brought this picture (Figure 1) of the Jarvik, the J-7 100 heart, to show you an example. It is basically a polyurethane rigid casing and polyurethane diaphragm. The MRS BULLETIN/MAY 1988
diaphragm has four layers ... with graphite between them. The movable pumping diaphragm is nondistensible so the walls never touch the outer casing, which is necessary to prevent destruction of blood. There are four clinical-grade valves This is a very simple basic device. The idea of the artificial heart first came from Charles Lindbergh. Shortly after coming back from his trans-Atlantic flight, he was told his aunt was dying from aortic stenosis. The doctor said that if there was some way they could actually stop the heart or bypass the heart... long enough to fix the valve, she could live.
Well, Lindbergh went to Alexis Carrel and they spent the remaining 20 years of Lindbergh's life working on an artificial heart. This was Lindbergh's so-called "glass heart" (Figure 2). He had a great deal of difficulty moving the blood atraumatically, but heparin had not been developed and anticoagulation was a difficult problem. He developed an artificial heart that in the late 1930s was only able to sustain some rat tissues. I believe the artificial heart we use today was really the one developed by Dr. Willem Kolff. Dr. Kolff gets the credit for being the inventor of the artificial heart as well as the inventor of the first successful artificial kidney. As many of you know, Dr. Kolff developed a dialysis machine in Holland during World War II. It's interesting to me that he dialyzed 17 people with end-stage renal disease, all of whom died either on the machine or shortly thereafter until he had a successful patient. Shortly after the war he came to work at the Cleveland Clinic, Mt. Sinai Hospital, and ended up at the University of Utah, where he had the insight to develop artificial heart laboratories as a multiple disciplinary means. When he came to the University of Utah, I'll never forget his first requirement—that he get involved in the engineering school When he tried to get the older established people in the medical school to help him with the surgery, they all thought what he was doing—to replace the natural beating perfectly good human heart with a pump—was crazy. He got many of the medical students who weren't smart enough to know any better, and we got involved in this at a very young age. I'll always be grateful for the opportunity he gave some unproved 25
Medical and Materials Issues of the Total Artificial Heart
Figure 1. The Jarvik heart has a polyurethane rigid casing, a polyu
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