[HN Gopher] Maglev titanium heart inside the chest of a live pat...
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Maglev titanium heart inside the chest of a live patient
Author : thunderbong
Score : 40 points
Date : 2024-07-26 17:51 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (newatlas.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (newatlas.com)
| Jyaif wrote:
| > the titanium heart is only meant to keep a patient alive while
| they wait for a heart transplant, which has always been the goal
| of fully mechanical heart development at this stage of the game.
|
| Why are we not aiming higher?
| nightfly wrote:
| Because we can barely get a temporary one working now. I'm sure
| they'd love to be able to make a permanent one, it's just not
| in the cards yet.
| WJW wrote:
| Same reason as why we're not developing starships to go to the
| other side of the Milky way at the moment: We don't know how to
| and the leap from "what we can do right now" (ie we struggle to
| get people to the moon permanently) and "other side of the
| galaxy" is simply too big.
| didgeoridoo wrote:
| This article does a good job of outlining the challenges faced:
| https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230217-the-61-year-long...
|
| From the outside, it looks like a race between figuring out the
| biocompatibility and power issues for total artificial hearts
| vs. figuring out the immunological issues for xenografts (pig
| hearts, mostly).
|
| If I had to put money on it, I'd bet that the xenografts win.
| It doesn't seem like we've made huge strides toward solving the
| power and durability requirements of total artificial hearts,
| while immunology advances are happening rapidly. Exciting
| times, nonetheless.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Totally, I've been following that space closely as well.
|
| Amazing times indeed, we are seeing xenografts and artificial
| organs in use.
| tomcam wrote:
| > Why are we not aiming higher?
|
| We've been aiming higher explicitly for at 70+ years
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_heart). I've been
| following it for 50. Artificial hearts were 5 years away since
| at least 1972 or so when I first learned about this field. The
| problems (mechanical, surgical, electrical, biological) are
| endless and it's an astoundingly hostile environment for
| machinery. We have enough problems getting pacemakers to work
| without severe problems.
| Leynos wrote:
| The Abiocor device always fascinated me.
|
| It was developed with long-term implantation in mind. You can
| read about it here:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/medicine-and-dentistry/...
|
| The use of inductive power transfer meant that no transdermal
| cabling was needed.
|
| Sadly, it sounds like for various reasons the dream was not
| achievable at the time.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I know people who worked on that, I've held one in my hand.
|
| It was not designed with long term implantation in mind.
|
| It was designed to get funding and keep the company alive.
| The device itself was very crude, not statenof the art at the
| time, and much of it was hand dip-molded with basic
| materials. It was a hand made research device that in all
| reality would have never been expected to be reliable and
| long lasting.
|
| The Bivacor, Heartmate III, these things are in a different
| class.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| The human heart is magical. They've been aiming higher since
| the 60s and this device is also aiming higher, but this is the
| stepping stone to that.
| enthulhusiastic wrote:
| Because our bodies are already peak technology.
|
| I think the 6-million-dollar man thing is a weird goal.
|
| Better to regrow, implant, perhaps supplement.
|
| Full-on replacement isn't just a "when" but a "why" and a "how
| do you expect to do better than evolution".
|
| Titanium is cool! That doesn't make it better than muscle.
|
| Go for a run if you want a better heart
| enthulhusiastic wrote:
| Okay, downvoter, don't take care of your health. Doesn't
| matter to me
| dylan604 wrote:
| You can do plenty of other things good for your heart that
| is much less damaging to the rest of the body. Running is
| horrible for joints. Just walking at a brisk pace will get
| the heart pumping. If we want people to get more active,
| there are much better things to suggest that go for a run.
| I ran long distance all through school, and refuse to run
| for running's sake. Playing soccer is the only running I
| will do, but at least there's a purpose. Walking, swimming,
| riding a bike, spin class, whatever are much easier
| suggestions for couch potatoes to start with
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" how do you expect to do better than evolution"_
|
| Because our goal is aligned with our actual problem (survival
| of individual human beings), as opposed to the merely
| partially-aligned goal of "statistical survival up to
| reproduction age"? Natural evolution is an unaligned AI, in a
| sense: powerful, but not helpful.
|
| Eventually humanity will defeat this problem, and we won't
| even need computational parity with natural evolution to do
| that. Most of that computation is wasted.
| nickburns wrote:
| dupe:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41086952
| dang wrote:
| Looks like that one was posted later* so we'll merge that
| thread hither. Thanks!
|
| * (you can tell from the item IDs)
| nickburns wrote:
| ah. was confused by the timestamping on my end (i.e. 41080654
| shows just '2 hours ago' and 41086952 shows '7 hours ago').
| must be some other inner-workings. but thanks for pointing
| out IDs to me for future reference.
| ajb wrote:
| Wonder how the join the arteries to it. Any pressure seems likely
| to kill biological tissue, and while it might grow on, presumably
| that would take a while. Maybe some kind of glue?
| iancmceachern wrote:
| They have what they call sewing cuffs attached to short
| arterial and venous grafts which you can get already for
| surgical repair of blood vessels. The sewing cuffs are
| essentially little cuffs made from polyester velour and
| silicone and then the surgeon sews through the flanges on the
| cuffs to anastomose to the blood vessels.
|
| Here is a paper that talks about it for LVADs, which are
| similar but different
|
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10047-022-01350-3
| floam wrote:
| The BiVACOR titanium artificial heart is sutured to the
| arteries, not glued. Surgeons use biocompatible synthetic graft
| materials (like Dacron or ePTFE) to connect the arteries to the
| device.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| Sometimes they use bioglue to cover up mistakes in their
| sewing, they're not supposed to, and you certainly can't do
| things like put bioglue all around the circumference, but my
| understanding is that it's used for touch up here and there.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _"...active control system... "_
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/this-maglev-heart-could-keep-cardi...
|
| That's some high-stakes software programming!
|
| Passively-stable magnetic levitation is possible with diamagnetic
| materials (notably including superconductors), but those probably
| don't meet the requirements of this project.
|
| - _" This positional control system works as follows: Tiny
| contactless sensors send out magnetic fields that interact with
| the rotor, determining its exact location many times per second.
| If the rotor is moving in one direction or another, the control
| system puts electrical energy into electromagnetic coils within
| several actuators, causing them to cancel out that movement."_
| elromulous wrote:
| Yes, but not as high-stakes as an autopilot in a commercial
| aircraft!
| yumraj wrote:
| This gives a new meaning to _heavy heart_
| low_tech_punk wrote:
| It's cool and spooky that the patient will no longer have heart
| beat, because the rotor will deliver continuous blood flow.
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