Take Heart

It’s always best to do a trial run before any big endeavour. And heart surgery is a big endeavour that’s becoming more common, as more and more people around the world live to an older age and rates of heart disease rise. Prosthetic heart valves and other implants are increasingly in-demand, so there’s a real need to find reliable ways of testing their efficacy before putting them in place. A team of engineers have now designed an artificial heart that offers a realistic testing platform for new devices. The bionic heart (shown layer-by-layer under magnetic resonance imaging) consists of soft robotic material that inflates and deflates to pulse like the real thing, layered over the structure of a real biological heart. It could allow future treatments to be tested much more safely and quickly than before, and with further development could eventually lead to an artificial heart for in-need patients.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

Website

• Video from work by Clara Park and colleagues
• Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
• Video copyright held by the original authors
• Published in Science Robotics, January 2020