Slashdot Mirror
15-Year-Old Boy Fitted With Robotic Heart
An anonymous reader writes "What do you do when a 15-year-old boy is close to death and ineligible for a heart transplant? If you're Dr. Antonio Amodeo you turn to an artificial solution and transplant a robotic heart, giving the boy another 20-25 years of life. The Italian boy in question suffers from Duchenne muscular dystrophy, which rapidly degenerates the muscles and eventually leads to death. Having such a disease renders the boy ineligible for a heart transplant, meaning almost certain death without an alternative solution. Dr. Amodeo found such an alternative in the form of a 90-gram, fully-robotic heart that took 10 hours to fit inside the boy's left ventricle. It is a permanent solution offering as much as 25 years of life and is powered by a battery worn as a belt."
I saw this movie already... Not one of Statham's Best...
The line between human and robot/artificial life form is getting thinner as the science progresses. That must have been a bitch of an operation though.
"We are just a war away from Amerikastan. When god vs god the undoing of man." Dave Mustaine
Such a heart was a big part of one of the worst episodes of Star Trek: the Next Generation evar!
I must be missing something here... because they seem to be wholly serious on their usage of the term "permanent"... which would imply to me that it should be lasting a heckuva lot longer than until he's forty.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It's been done.
Are there other conditions that limit him to 25 years? Or is it the life of the device? If not, why could a new, probably better, device not be installed in 20 or so years thereby extending life further?
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
" It is a permanent solution offering as much as 25 years of life and is powered by a battery worn as a belt."
Let's see 15 years old plus 25 years means 40.
That is not really a normal life span. Yes this is great news but not what I would call a permanent solution. But even if it only worked for a year it is sort of permanent.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Young Anthony Stark now just needs to learn engineering, and build himself an Exo Suit!
25 years >> 0 years
I'd freak out if my heart were powered by something strapped around my waist. The only option would be to build a bullet-proof metal suit with a built-in nuclear power supply. If I had enough energy left over, jet-powered hands and feet along with a dry-witted AI partner in my helmet would be a plus.
I wish I could feel better about this, but I don't. Most of these artificial hearts require systemic anticoagulation. Otherwise, they generate clots, which can travel to the brain and create a series of strokes, ultimately killing the patient.. Systemic anticoagulation brings it's own set of serious problems (bleeding tendencies, tissue changes, etc). My best wishes for this young man and his family.
I have only read the linked articles, but the description sounds like a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD. This is a pump that helps the heart push blood, rather than replacing the heart, which is what I generally think of when people talk about artificial hearts. It sounds like the innovation here is the size, its use in a child, and the length of time they plan to use it, since it is generally used as a bridge to transplant.
I think they are optimistic in thinking they can get 25 years, since we really haven't evolved the material science to have implantable devices for that long without provoking clot formation or scarring, but it sounds like they didn't have a lot of options here.
in 20 years a better one will be put in and the old one may need to be replaced any ways better to replace it before it fails!
This is Slashdot, where Space Nuttery reigns supreme. We should colonize the entire Universe and gobble up resources everywhere we go, but life extension is evil.
How dare we use technology to extend this person's life span?
OK Taco, erase this comment as soon as you can just like you do with all my anti Space-whackjob posts!
We'd gotten this treatment for the Tin Man. It would have saved him an awful lot of trouble, what with having to go to the Emerald City and all.
I am officially gone from
How do they know that the heart will last for 25 years? Was it invented over 25 years ago? Mechanical devices have a nasty tendency to fail earlier than expected in wet, goopy environments like the human body.
Article (and doctor) says that it's powered by a plug that inserts behind his left ear. Does that mean he has a power cable running from his head to his chest? How did they implant that? I somehow doubt they made an incision the whole length. Did they run it along a blood vessel? They also said the implant itself fits into the left ventricle. So is the pump basically just powering half of heart, and relying on residual pressure to work the other half? If he's suffering from muscular degeneration, does having an external source moving what's left of the muscles result in any complications? The graphic (and explanation) seems to indicate that the implant is just pump that forces blood through an inoperative heart. Presumably that's enough enough to work the heart valves.
So many questions!
Then it isn't a permanent solution is it?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So, he's pretty much Iron Man then.
Will probably have a panic attack if he ever sees Jude Law
This sounds like something straight out of the movie Repo Men, which makes me wonder... how much does one of these things cost? And what happens if you can't pay up?
At least he'll never get his heart broken
Aside from what everybody else has already pointed out, there is another point. If they find a cure for MD within 25 years, it would be just as permanent for him as it would be for you or me.
When you consider that people with cancer are sometimes willing to prolong their suffering for just a couple years in hope for a cure, 25 years is quite a win!
There is cure or treatment. Right now all we can do is watch him every day get alittle weaker as i slowly effects all of his muscles. When your child is born, you never guess that you will end up out living him. If this works, it would offer alittle bit of sunlight in my son's dark future. What would you do to keep your child alive?
To be more precise disease is where the body's functions are changed resulting in disruption of vital functions. But if the body was always this way nothing has changed so I could see how you might think it's not a disease. But officially MD is a disease. The definition also applied to things like heart disease, which often has a genetic cause.
I suspect that the word "disease" has some connotations for you that don't exist for the rest of us, perhaps you should educate yourself further with a simple dictionary to remove this misunderstanding?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
"Transplant" means to move from one body to another, they likely meant "implant" unless some robot somewhere literally gave up a component to save that boys life ;)
Sounds like they just implated a LVAD Left Ventricle Assist Device, Dick Cheney just had one implated a couple of months ago.
Got Code?
I imagine it to be much like this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRcXULN6mp4
(can't believe that's actually relevant.)
Warning: robot gang fight.
Well maybe it is; the fact that the heart is permanently (well, for a couple of decades anyway) implanted is.
My cousin had an infection in her heart and almost died. She lived without a heart for six months, the blood pumped by man-made machinery. This was almost ten years ago.
As to the line between human and robot/artificial life form is getting thinner, I don't agree; there are a LOT of cyborgs walking around. I'm a cyborg; the lens in my left eye is an artificial device that can focus as well at all distances as a young man's natural lens. I know people with artificial joints. And does my new eyesight make me less human than I was before the surgery? Does it make me less human than I'd be had I not had surgery and simply gone blind in that eye?
All heart surgery is a bitch, even getting stents. I'm glad heart disease doesn't run in my family (like I said, my cousin's was a bacterial infection, not Burger King).
Free Martian Whores!
"Implanted an artificial heart" somehow got translated into "Transplanted a robot heart" ?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
No, in 20 years his lungs will have given out, or his stomach ceases to function, or his intestines fail, or his large arteries collapse.
A pump that lasts 20 years is trivial, and medical devices are generally of extremely high quality, so you can bet your ass that pump isn't going to wear out in 20 years.
Instead of his heart failing at fifteen, something else will fail at 35. That's what it means. It's permanent, and it's going to extend his life by 20 years.
It's the boy who is going to wear out by then, not the pump.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
I hope for his sake he doesn't end up dying and meeting an immortal egotistical cheeky bastard.
Domo origato.
I wonder if in the future, this type of procedure will be standard. Say you hit 55 and the stats say you'd be better off just replacing the heart instead of taking the risk of a heart attack.
I could see this happening. And with millions getting the treatment every year, costs would likely go down 2-3% with HMOs pocketing the rest of the savings.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Everything you do is a stop gap measure - we're not immortal.
Permanent in this case means the same as it does for me or you - until death. Which in this poor kid's definition is most likely shorter than what you or I will get. It's the last artificial heart he'll ever need. So for him, we can say it's permanent. He'll be buried with it.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMThdnTRCWI
"--wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy." --Benjamin Franklin
I know I should lighten up, but I really resent the decay of the term robot. Robots are autonomous devices. They were so when the term was first used in Rossum's Universal Robots.
A mechanical heart is not a robot. It only does work for you in a purely physics definition. (If you allow a physics definition of work for robot, then a lever that bends slightly is a robot -- it reacts to the amount of weight put on it by bending and it does 'work' for you.)
This heart is a mechanical device. It ends there. It is not a robot.
Similarly, remote-controlled devices, no matter how cool, are not robots. You are controlling them. They are not autonomous. We are not fighting the war in Afghanistan with robots. Stop saying that.
This pisses me off not because it's devaluing a term I think will be important someday, when we actually do have robots, but because it reflects a growing (or was it always there?) stupidity amongst the populace. They know what a robot is on a macro level, but they have no idea what this heart is on the most basic mechanical or control level. They don't understand machines of any sort, electronics of any sort, or fine distinctions of logic. They don't think about things and they're more interested in what sounds cool than what's correct.
Years ago, I put an extra question on all our screening tests for job applicants in computer jobs (networking, IT, etc). It was "How does a light bulb work?" The number of people who left the answer blank, answered "I don't know" or answered incorrectly was staggering. Not surprisingly, the people who knew enough to be considered for the computer job also generally knew how a light bulb worked and tended to answer the question in detail with something close to glee.
They constituted a vanishingly small percent of the applicants.
Why is this "robotic" and not just "mechanical" ?
Artificial hearts of one sort or another have been around since the 70's. All that's really new here is his age.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
I thought Jarvik covered this ground in the 80s?
http://www.jarvikheart.com/basic.asp?section=Jarvik+2000
Now all he needs is a motorcycle with a nuclear warhead sidecar tied to his heartbeat and some glass knives and he can live out the rest of his days as the world's biggest badass. As a plus, the US government will do absolutely anything to make sure he doesn't die, ever.
I'll be honest, we're throwing science against the wall to see what sticks. -Cave Johnson
and the record for the most detailed (and correct) report of how a lightbulb works is???
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Has anyone seen Crank 2: high voltage???? same thing but GTA style
Light bulbs, you accept them without knowing exactly how they work. What you think is that the current flows through two metal contacts, and reacts with a gas to emit light. Of course this is not true, well the emitting light part. What's really happening is the current does go through the metal contacts, but it doesn't emit light. In fact what it's really doing is sucking up all the dark in the room. This is the total opposite of how you thought the light bulb worked. Once the light bulb is turned on, there is no more dark, but once turned off the dark returns. What happens is that there are two layers of atmosphere one dark, the other light. The dark is a layer so powerful that it completely blocks out the light layer. Once the light bulb is turned on, it sucks in all the dark that is around it revealing the light layer. After the light bulb is turned off the dark layer will quickly fill in the area that had been sucked in by the light bulb. A great example of this is the sun, essentially it's a big dark sucker, it sucks in all the dark around it and reveals the light layer. Once the star becomes too old, it will start a Super Nova, this is similar to putting to much current through a light bulb and having it explode. The star will explode, destroying everything in it's path and then cease to suck the dark. In some cases it would become a black hole and start sucking in light that has managed to escape from the help of nearby dark suckers. There are many different layers of lights, all coming in a different colour. A dark sucker reacting with a different gas will suck in a different degree of dark and reveal a different layer of light. Most of the time these dark suckers are less effective compared to the more common dark sucker. Some examples of different dark suckers would be mercury lights. This has the same basis of a regular dark sucker, but reacts with mercury to create a different amount of dark being sucked in, thus this will allow a coloured light to be visible. In this case, purple. The guy who invented the light bulb, Thomas something or other, thought he was right in that it emits light. But this being a long time ago when people were dumb and such, didn't know any better. Only a few people know of how a light bulb really works. The reasons why you have been lied to is due to a government conspiracy. The whole truth in why the government(s) have covered this up is unclear. People have speculated that it has something to do with aliens, but they are all full of crap. The most probable reason is due to the Nazi's, how they purposely tried to make the earth permanently dark. Their experiment didn't work according to plan. To this day, no one knows exactly why the government(s) are encouraging this "light bulbs emit light" theory. It does give you a bit to think about now doesn't it? Exactly what else are they not telling us?
Is Android.
Or did none of you watch Bicentennial Man?
At what point does this person lose all his "rights" because some-legal-eagle has him declared "not human enough"?
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy is a progressive, irreversible muscular disorder where the muscle cells literally pull themselves apart due to the lack of a key membrane-stabilising protein, Dystrophin.
So now this boy's heart can't give out for 25 years, you're then only consigning him to die of suffocation as his diaphragm does.
Oh no, ventilator. Well, let's wait for his oesophagus, colon and eye muscles to go...
But he's still alive, just locked into an immobile, artificially ventilated body with a heart that will never stop.
That seems worse than the natural alternative to me.
Who knows what advances in medical science will reveal. Perhaps they will find some sort of genetic trigger to undo some of the effects of MD
Wow...so what happens now to all the comments/songs - "Your soul is in you heart" or similar?
God creates souls, Doctors create comments.
They did not remove his original heart. It has a rotary motor in so Dick no longer has a pulse. I believe his device is rated 7-8 years. Dick is probably too old and frail for a heart transplant.
I, for one, welcome our robotic over-lards
Am I the first to say "Fuck You Chelios!" :)
Crank 2
Joking aside, I'm crossing my fingers for the boy to get the physical and mental energy to survive at least another 25 years.
Domo arigato.
is GOLD. How many of you would give up all your money for two more years with a parent or grandparent you
once had. TWO YEARS IS GOLD. Ten? An unbelievable gift. All of you "well I'd rather die" people need to get
real. There is no reboot, no second chance. You have to take what you are given and hold onto it with all your might.
So, I take it some poor robot suffered a surprising and horrific death and had also signed his donor card? I'm guessing the donor was Fe+.
caused by the Duchenne MD? Yes. Now this poor boy will have to live another 25 years locked in a body he has no control over. I'm sorry, but that's not life, hell, that's not even existence. That sounds more like, well, Hell.
Having such a disease renders the boy ineligible for a heart transplant, meaning almost certain death without an alternative solution.
Well, duh.
Dr. Amodeo found such an alternative in the form of a 90-gram, fully-robotic heart that took 10 hours to fit inside the boy's left ventricle. It is a permanent solution offering as much as 25 years of life and is powered by a battery worn as a belt."
What could POSSIBLY go wrong, eh?
This being very Catholic Italy, I have my suspicions that this whole exercise is being undertaken out of some perverse familial desire to keep the boy alive long enough for him to sire a male offspring, a la the case of the Boy in the Bubble.
Having such a disease renders the boy ineligible for a heart transplant . . .
your name happens to be Mickey Mantle, eh?
Remember that? He got a new liver after he nearly drank himself to death. Normally a transplant committee wouldn't even open the file in such a circumstance, but money talks.
Redundancy. Give me 3 or 4 redundant hearts and I'll be feeling pretty good about things.
or else!
Does the pump speed automatically change during activities?
Can the pump speed/pattern be customized to increase performance?
How long will it take before some girl comes and breaks it. :'(
Robotic pencil sharpener
Not a robot, but awesome :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKL6elkbFy0
Why is parent modded insightful for only commenting on the first sentence of a post obviously meant as a joke?
(Pop culture reference: Iron Man. I have not seen the movie, nor read the cartoon, and still got the reference. Insightful? WTF?)
Slashdot, you're growing soft. Soon, every half-witted poet lamenting any aspect of life will be modded "insightful".
Years ago, I put an extra question on all our screening tests for job applicants in computer jobs (networking, IT, etc). It was "How does a light bulb work?" The number of people who left the answer blank, answered "I don't know" or answered incorrectly was staggering. Not surprisingly, the people who knew enough to be considered for the computer job also generally knew how a light bulb worked and tended to answer the question in detail with something close to glee.
They constituted a vanishingly small percent of the applicants.
Here's how (most) lightbulbs work: I interact with a switch and it turns on. I interact with a switch and it turns off. Seriously, that is all I need to know. Interface/implementation anyone? You work in IT and expect a user of a lightbulb to know about anything more than its interface? If you are screening out job applicants with a question the knowledge of which is completely useless for that job and life in general, then I'd say you're doing your job wrong.
Finally, we have artificial hearts, something which governments will hate because old people will live longer being a drain on our society even longer...no offense, but all in all, if we see this happening, we need to have more also for muscles tissue regen. as there is nothing worse then being able to live longer with a new heart, but not having the muscles to get you around and being stuck in your bed or chair all the time...bicentennial man was a great movie that pointed out such possibilities within society, but they also had every other organ available, giving humans double the regular lifespan, 200 years or so i think...if i remember correctly.
And you feel you need to point that out because? Oh and antidepressants do wonders. I've felt pain and I've felt depressed and it's been depressed that made me want to kill myself.
Don't go swimming with that battery belt....
It's been a few years and I don't remember too well, but the reconstruction in my mind (which might very well be a composite) had a little picture, explained that the filament heated up, etc. No more than three lines -- it is just a light build after all -- but you could see the enthusiasm in some of the answers. "Oh, goody! I get to explain something!"
...between an artificial heart and a robotic heart?
As you say, left ventricular assist devices have been around for some time, and fully artificial heart replacements (or temporary substitutes) are not new either.
They just were not called "robotic hearts" before. They were called artificial hearts.
What makes this a "robotic heart", or is this phraseology just journalistic license? The article doesn't help.
Hell yeah one step closer to artificial bodies.
20 years is not bad considering previous robotic hearts.