Bionic Human: 1st Fully Implanted Human Heart

InnerCityCaching writes "Doctors at the University of Louisville have removed a patients heart and replaced it with an artificial pump that has no wires to the outside world. One of five FDA approved test implants, neither the hospital nor Abiomed Inc., would confirm or deny the surgery." This is bigger news than it sounds - the older artificial hearts had massive battery and battery needs, while this heart is charged by placing coils on the skin. As we get closer to creating more artificial body parts, the issues of batteries, much like powering laptops for longer times become more critical and the solutions become more intrinsically interesting. Too bad they can't use code morphing to make better use of battery life. *grin*

Comments

Re:Too bad they cant use older technology.

[Anonymous Coward]

There are a few different types of nuclear batteries. They fall into two categories: Heat and Particle Emission. In the heat versions, the breakdown of the radioactive element produces heat. That heat is then either used to heat a thermoelectric junction (thermopile) or, in the case of larger batteries, to run a stirling, or rankin? cycle engine, or steam turbine genenerator.

The particle emission varieties use the particles emitted from the radioactive decay to ionoize a gas, which is then discharged through electrodes. Another variation uses the particles to push electrons across a PN junction in a semiconductor. (Essentially, strapping a solar cell onto a block of radioactive material.)

Good to see

[Synn]

My dad is recovering in St Louis after having a ventrical assist heart pump installed. He's 70 years old, otherwise in good health, but is old enough to not be a candidate for a new heart transplate.

Essentially these new types of technologies are the only hope for a lot of people in heart failure.

If I remember correctly his pump(and this new artifical heart probably uses the same power) has an internal 1 hour battery, runs off of external 4 hour worn battery packs, and plugs into an AC outlet unit that can hold a 12 hour charge.

And while a 4 hour "timer" for being away from home may not sound like much, it can mean a 500% improvement in the quality of life for most of these people whose low heart output would otherwise restrict them to the home(and eventually bed).

This is all new territory, no one really knows the long term effects this tech will have(for example my dad no longer has a pulse, his blood flows in a steady stream from the pump and no one knows if this will mess with the body or the mind). These guys are the ultimate Beta testers.

Too bad they cant use older technology.

[Lumpy]

Some pacemakers had a nuclear battery. I am not sure exactly whst types but this link talks about nuclear pacemakers being just thrown in the trash by funeral homes. Couldn't you gang up 2-3 of these and generate enough power? that way battery life is no longer an issue (well except for every 5-10 years for a fuel rod replacement !)

Re:Too bad they cant use older technology.

[gorilla]

It's decay generates heat, which is used to generate electricity.

Re:Too bad they cant use older technology.

[jonnythan]

Nuclear batteries work this way, I think: a small amount of some radioactive substance is placed in a container. The substance slowly decays, giving off neutrons or gamma rays or whatnot. These decay by products are absorbed by the encasing material, which turns the heat into electricity (nature of the substance..that's all I know, i'm not a materials guy ;)). They usually generate quite a few milliwatts. Of course, the amount of electricity they generate is exponentially decaying, but you can get a good balance of half life and power output to last quite a while.

Re:Too bad they cant use older technology.

[Kazmat]

Nuclear pacemakers aren't powered by a fuel rod, but a tiny pellet of radioactive material. That link talks about Pu-238 being used, maybe that's a error or maybe it's a very unusual isotope of plutonium (the normal isotope is Pu-239). In the case of Pu-239, the half-life is about 25000 years... considerably longer than the life of the human it's sustaining. When plutonium decays, it gives out heat, and this heat is used to power the pacemaker. Probably using the Thompson effect.

Unfortunately, this technology will never work for artificial hearts, which require far more power than a pacemaker power source can supply.

Personally, I think instead of using alien (to the human body) power sources, like batteries, plutonium pellets, etc, they'd be better off using fuel cells. Fuel cells can metabolise substances in the bloodstream, just like the human heart does. Think of it this way: the heart is pumping huge amounts of blood, all packed full of sugar and oxygen; why not use that power supply instead of ignoring it for some artificial alternative?

PBS show on artificial hearts

[peter303]

Last week PBS repeated its show about the artificial heart industry.
Except most of their technology was heart-assist.
The heart muscle stays in, even if it doesn't do
much.

The showed one patient waiting for a transplant
who had about a dozen spare batteries in reserve.
There are "Semi-portable" meaning you can go away
from the main console for a few hours at a time.
But you need to sleep near it for maximum safety.

Re:Anonymous, indeed

[ethereal]

Hey, don't be knockin' Dick Cheney - without him, nothing would stand between W and the presidency :)

Re:NPR

[rleyton]

In the article itself, it reads:

Abiomed wants to observe a ''quiet period'' with no media comment so the patient can recover with his or her family in private, and so the surgical team can devote all its energy to the operation and patient care, Ed Berger, an Abiomed spokesman, has said over the past several months.

Stressing again that he was not confirming or denying that the implant had taken place, Berger said yesterday that Abiomed and the surgical team had agreed to comment only when they were sure they could ''meet the demands of the press without compromising patient care.''

Whilst this development in heart surgey is exciting, I figure it'd be rather bizarre, and possibly very counter-productive, for the poor patient to become the subject of a (possibly) intrustive press campaign, whilst they battles with their recovery.

Re:Would you really want a beta test model?

[sharkey]

Tried to make an "Uncle Ben's Rice Bowl" for lunch. After I hit the START button on the microwave, I woke up under a large dent in the wall across the kitchen. Do I need a new Windows?

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Cancer?

[Shotgun]

How can doctors do this to heart patients. Charging the heart's battery with a coil. Don't they know that electro-magnetic radiation causes cancer?! Or is that only when it is produce by big, powerful corporations or forced upon us through cell phones?

I get so confused sometimes.

Re:Cancer?

[Shotgun]

Humor. Sarcasm. Laugh. HA!HA!

Geesh!

There is no evidence that power lines or cell phones cause cancer. EMR is permeates you constantly. The people who scream, "IT'LL KILL ALL THE LITTLE KIDDIES IN THE SCHOOLYARD", are alarmist idiots looking for attention. Hence, it is funny that what these people see as being so dangerous will enable a lot of people to have a much better life.

So LAUGH, damn-it!!

Newsweek had an article about this tech. last week

[dman6666]

Article was in the dead tree version... I think this link will do the trick:
http://www.msnbc.com/news/588549.asp

Picture (probably will not work, but, it's duplicated in the above link):
http://a799.ms.akamai.net/3/799/388/1ef1542396c1 07 /www.msnbc.com/news/983460.gif

I hadn't gotten the impression, from the report, that it was ready for human use. I remember reading it had to be tested and was years away from approval. Thus, it's probably not the /same/ technology, but, it is related.

Re:More info (on power system)

[GPSguy]

Transdermal induction-based power supplies were first successfully introduced about 1985; before that they were bigger, bulkier, damaged the skin, had poor efficiency, and were just plain painful. Still, the amount of power transferrable across the intact skin, without damaging same, isn't likely to be enough to provide much juice for a continuously operating motor. Even at low power settings, the continuous portion of that equation is a battery-draining issue.

Further, batteries have to be non-venting and encased in a bio-neutral container. Last time I looked, that pretty well limited them to nickle-cadmium cells, or sealed, depleted electrolyte lead-acid cells. The lead-acid cells are too heavy for these purposes. The number of NiCd's one can package in an unobtrusive manner, and manage to parallel in a fashion that will provide good current-density, is still small. Further, despite advances in NiCd chemistry, there are still issues with "memory" (dendritic formation within the cells) and cycle life. I anticipate more battery work will ensue, especially if the physiology of this device in humans is borne out (most of the testing has been in calves; the issues of cell morphology and fragility are not identical!), then a device like this will spur significant research in associated fields... because the money AND the good will are there.

Re:"this is bigger news than it sounds..."

[GPSguy]

I spent a number of years in the articifial heart field while at Texas Heart Institute. It really *IS* big news.

All the artificial heart implants in humans have been tethered implants. The patient has had to be tied to a console or power source, electrical or air, with no more than brief respites of untethered activity. The devices have been harsh on quality of life, and a whole host of physiologic functions. They have not allowed normal interaction with other humans, and those few patients who've ventured outside the walls of the hospital were making brief visits away, not returning to the world.

The Abiomed pump is small enough to reasonably be implanted, and reliable enough to expect it to work well. The centers selected for the initial implants have sufficient experience with animal implantation, AND various human procedures of a more mundane variety, to expect them to be able to manage the patients well, indeed.

We're about 9 years behind where I thought we'd get to with a really viable, implantable heart, mainly because of the costs necessary to support this sort of research. It's long overdue.

I suspect that the 125,000 potential patients Abiomed cited in the article may be an understatement. Doesn't matter. If this allows some patients who were dying waiting for a transplant...or who were deemed not good candidates for the scarce resource of a donated heart... a shot at a good quality life and a time extension, this is WONDERFUL news.

Makes me wish I'd stayed in the game.

Thankfully...

[joq]

With news reports which claim that Sony's PS2 threatens the Department of Defense, I'm glad there's no way someone could say h4x0rs were to blame for a buffer overflow which caused Dick Cheney to have a heart attack or something

Re:In the trash?

[Kintanon]

It's not like the planet gives a rats ass anyways... The worst possible result of mans existance is that we annihilate ourselves and every other living thing on this rock, but I don't believe that even the simultaneous detonation of all of the nuclear weapons on earth would destroy the rock beyond the point that the matter would recoalesce and sometime before the sun burnt out new intelligent life would be here. So don't worry, the earth isn't in danger, WE ARE...

Kintanon

Re:External power supply?

[cdrudge]

From a newsweek article that describes the device, it appeared that the patient wears a battery belt that has one or more camcorder sized batteryies. This apparently was a big step since the previous artificial hearts required huge battery carts. I seem to recall that there was an internal battery so that the external batteries could be replaced easily and for emergency backup.

Batteries

[NTSwerver]

As we get closer to creating more artificial body parts, the issues of batteries, much like powering laptops for longer times become more critical and the solutions become more intrinsically interesting.

Well if the robots in The Matrix can power all of their hardware using humans as batteries, can't we harnace enough of that potential energy in one human to power his/her own artificial heart?

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Re:Batteries

[jareds]

If our own biological heart uses electricial energy to pump, why can't an artifical pump use that same signal?

Our biological hearts do not use electrical energy to pump. They get energy by oxidizing glucose they get from the blood, the same way the rest of the body does (the blood also carries the oxygen). That's why you have to breath, to get oxygen. (Technically, cells can and do generate small amounts of energy without oxygen, but if your heart has to resort to that, you're pretty much dead.) The nerve signals are just that: signals. The amount of energy they carry is miniscule.

Re:Batteries

[Dunbal]

This is an interesting question. Being a doc, I feel qualified to answer it :)

The heart relies on its own internal "pacemakers", which generate the electrical signals that cause it to beat. If you take someone's heart out of their body and put it in the biopsy jar, it's hard to think how you could harness this signal (unless of course your career as a cardiologist comes to an untimely end because all of your patients also wind up in specimen jars in the Pathology lab).

The heart is completely automatic, and self contained. The few nerve endings that DO go to the heart are part of the autonomous nervous system, and they can do things like "speed it up" or "slow it down", or change the size of blood vessels in and around the heart. A final function is to provide the sensation of pain, which is felt by many (but not all) people when they suffer an acute myocardial infarction (heart attack) or angina. But the actual "beating" part is a built in thing.

There ARE circumstances that DO permit the use of the heart's own current, an example is an AV block. In this case, disease causes an obstruction to the path of the electrical signal, preventing it from reaching the ventricles. Certain types of pacemaker can be plugged into the SA node (the part where electrical signals in the heart originate). They detect the change in potential that signals a beat, and tell a battery powered microchip to send an electrical current directly to the ventricles, causing them to beat as well. So this device essentially re-wires the heart, providing an alternate and artificial path for the electrical signal.

But an artificial device cannot use the signal, since you've taken the signal-generating mechanism out :)

As an interesting side note, the fact that the heart is completely automatic has caused a lot of problems in legal medicine, one of which being the fact that a person can be completely dead and yet their heart can still be beating. This is where "neurological" and "brain" death comes in. Still we view the heart in an almost romantic sense, and most people associate a pulse with "life", and lack of a pulse with "death". It is perfectly possible to have a neurologically dead person hooked up to life support machinery and have their heart go on beating for years or even decades. But if the brain is gone, that person is never coming back, and is (in most countries) legally dead. There are also very few people who are alive and perfectly healthy, and yet have no tangible pulse. This is called "Takayasu's disease", and I personally met one of these patients. The fun part was when my tutor asked me to get her pulse, hoping I would lie and say "72" or so :)

"ex corporis, scientia; ex scientia, aris"

External power supply?

[Dr_Cheeks]

Can anyone set me straight on something - does this require an external power source or does it draw power from the patient? As far as I can tell from the article, the coil beneath the skin is used for induction, so you wouldn't need to plug the patient in, but you still need to use an external power source to induce a supply current for the artificial heart. Surely this would still require a fairly portable power source (like a battery), since the internal battery only lasts 30 mins.

However, Hemos seems to think that it draws it's power from the skin itself, not from a supply through the skin. I guess the article is a little unclear. But does anyone have any less ambiguous info on this?

Re:External power supply?

[Dr_Cheeks]

IANADr (despite the nick), but I don't think the insulin pumps are anywhere near as invasive - the insulin just needs to be introduced to your bloodstream (IIRC my GCSE Biology lessons), but until now artificial hearts have required a wire from outside your skin direct to your heart. Your blood stream is pretty good at fighting infection, but give the nasties a direct highway to your heart and I guess things would be more complicated.

Answer to 1

[Dr_Cheeks]

The patients aren't so sick they can't undergo surgery, but they are going to die soon regardless of whether they get a new heart or not. Doctors have to make the difficult judgement on who gets a new heart based on who's going to benefit the most from it; if there's 2 guys with a year left, 1 heart, and it'll extend one life by 10 years and the other by 6 months, then the six month guy is going to lose out.

OK, so that's a gross simplification, but you get the idea. These patients are up for this surgery because otherwise they'd be ruled out, and they're understandably willing to take the risk.

Clients...

[swordgeek]

The reference to code morphing got me thinking.

"Hey Dave, hear you got a new heart. How's it feel?"

"Well I'm pretty tired, but that's probably because I'm using spare battery cycls to run SETI@Home."

NPR

[Trinition]

I remember hearing about this last week on NPR. They said that Abiomed had stated it would take place, but not when -- just within the next week (from the time the story aired).

So they were being vage about it before it happened and are being vague after it happened. Whyy all of the secrecy?

Re:But having to recharge every 30 min? Tesla Coil

[drinkypoo]

Or... Install a tesla coil in your home! That way, you at least don't need to recharge while you're at home!

For those who are wondering what this is all about: http://www.hightension.org/frameset.htm?wireless.h tm and http://www.pbs.org/tesla/res/res_art08.html.

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ALL YOUR KARMA ARE BELONG TO US

You should have asked the right company

[Lechter]

Maybe if you'd talked to The Biomed Inc. instead of just A Biomed Inc. you would have been able to confirm that the surgery actually took place!

...I'm sorry. I appologize for that horrible joke. Feel free to mod this down to -2... That is a cool achievement though; it brings us one more step closer to useful implanted information devices.

Dick Cheney Sees Wizard, Recieves Heart

[tenzig_112]

How long will the old man have to hold on before he can get ahold of one of these babies? A bionic heart sounds like just the thing for America's favorite bacon lover.

Dick Cheney Sees Wizard, Recieves Heart

Would you really want a beta test model?

[tenzig_112]

I won't even install a 1.0 video card for fear that my computer will explode. Can you imagine what the beta testers notes would look like?

On several occasions, when I use a cell phone on my left side, I black out. This is unfortunate as I tend to use my phone when I can't get to a land line- i.e. when I'm driving. Have someone look into that.

So, it's not for me. However, Dick Cheney coud use one of these.

Anonymous, indeed

[American AC in Paris]

From the article:

The heart implanted yesterday has a tiny electric motor in it. An implanted battery that powers the motor is kept charged by a system that uses no wires or tubes. Instead, the battery, which can last about 30 minutes without a recharge, gets its power renewed from a coil that transfers energy through the skin.

If it works as hoped, the AbioCor could keep people alive, alert and mobile for years. They would wear battery packs or plug into an electrical outlet to keep their hearts going.

...so basically, if Cheney's Secret Service guys start lugging a bunch of car batteries and extension cords around, we'll have a pretty good idea of who this "unknown" recipient is.

...though I suspect that it would take more than just an artificial heart to make Cheney seem alive and alert...

We're not in Kansas any more Toto

[WIAKywbfatw]

So now we can give people 100% fully independent artificial heart transplants, isn't it time we moved on to brains, courage and a portable instantaneous matter transportation device (aka magic red shoes) that will take you anywhere you want to go?

Buckle up Dorothy, cos Kansas is going bye-bye...

All well and good, but some questions

[carlcmc]

1) "as an experiment on terminally ill heart patients who aren't candidates for transplants because they are so sick." Um, if they are too sick to go through regular heart surgery why wouldn't they be too sick for this. Its not like OKT3 and cyclosporin and coumadin are easy on the body either.

2)I suppose i'd rather take coumadin the rest of my life (blood thinner to prevent thrombus formation on the valves in the artificial heart) than cyclosporing / OKT3 (anti rejection drugs). But your exercise tolerance and managability defintely wouldn't be as good as the transplanted heart because it wouldn't be able to respond to inotropes/beta blockers/ace inhibitors/calcium channel blockers.

Re:Worrying...

[Waffle Iron]

How do they ensure a reliable power supply (i.e. uptime...) over some years?

They make the patient sign a contract that forbids them from travelling to California.

not the only problem

[s20451]

The need for external connections to a power supply was only one impediment to the development of an artificial heart. The other important one was that, for some reason, plastic tends to promote the formation of blood clots, so before long the patient would die of a stroke.

SEX!

[roxytheman]

Wonder how many seconds of sex the batteries can take... And it also would be pretty bad if during the act you "uh oh... hold that position.. I just got to change my batteries" ..
Coming to think of the Duracell bunny, but that is anothre story...

Human Hearts and Laptop Batteries?

[Thomas M Hughes]

Great, now someone is going to go patent the battery that can power both your laptop and your heart. You need to stop giving ideas to these people!

By the way, why can't you have code morphing for human hearts?
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