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Engineer Designs His Own Heart Valve Implant
nametaken writes "In 2000, Tal Golesworthy, a British engineer, was told that he suffers from Marfan syndrome, a disorder of the connective tissue that often causes rupturing of the aorta. The only solution then available was the pairing of a mechanical valve and a highly risky blood thinner. To an engineer like Golesworthy, that just wasn't good enough. So he constructed his own implant that does the job better than the existing solution--and became the first patient to try it."
the is gone ... 404
It's good to be born for a purpose..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
here
Slashdot ya no es que lo era!
Fuck POPSCI, here's the link to the original article (Warning: graphic photographs)
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
...heal thyself!
I knew a conceptual artist who tried the same thing.
I miss him.
Harder-core still, of course, would be designing and implanting it yourself. While quite rare, DIY abdominal surgery is possible and documented....
As an engineer by training, I find this to be very cool.
I myself suffer from a physical... ahem.. shortcoming.
So, just like this engineer, I designed and constructed a solution using a banana and some duct tape.
My wife loves it!
After reading this article, I am thinking I will go ahead and publicize my invention.
Another yay for engineers!
Stories like this make me proud of my alma mater, Colorado School of Mines, for having a bio-medical engineering minor for mechanical engineers. We need more engineers working in medicine.
So climate's changing. So what? It has always changed. The big news would be if it wasn't changing. - Dr. Philip Stone
Tony Stark? Because if so I want to talk to him now about building a few other upgrades for me.
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
Do it yourself ;-)
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
I can only hope to become an engineer with such a great and benificial impact.
There's no need - and hasn't been for a long time, at least 15-20 years - to put in a mechanical valve just for aortic valve disease. There are cadaveric (organ-donor) valves and porcine (pig-heart) valves available. They don't last as long as the mechanical ones, but they don't need anticoagulation. Given that he had Marfan syndrome, however, it's quite likely that the problem was a valve-and-aortic-root problem, just like the Bentall procedure I did the anesthesia for today, which does better with a mechanical valve. His solution is impressive: no quibbles on that here. Imaging a heart to get dimensions is hideously difficult. Getting a 3D model of the aorta is some fine engineering in itself.
However, he has mostly transferred the problem downstream - the root of the aorta is the most elastic part of a very elastic vessel, and transmitting the higher pressure downstream (which his aorta-corset will do) will lead to increased ballooning of the segment closest to the heart. The hard part is to make sure that that segment can handle it for the remainder of his expected lifespan.
I assume it is a valve replacement but nowhere in any article did I see a description of how it works or if it even any different from the existing artificial heart valve designs.
About 20 years ago my father had his aortic valve replaced (due to plaque buildup). He got a mechanical valve. While they were in there they did a bunch of bypasses for which they had to take venus grafts from his legs. I asked his cardiologist why there weren't any synthetic grafts. Harvesting the veins just seems like an opportunity for infection to me. He just said that there weren't any and seemed uninterested in the question. BTW, Mehmet Oz, Dr. Oz from TV, did the surgery. He had just done Frank Torre's heart transplant the year before.
that Portal 2 may be the most anticipated game of the year, but showing your compassion for Valve in this way is just ridiculous.
I have had 3 aortic valves implanted throughout my lifetime. Starting at the age of 2. I've also survived a Konno procedure and aortic stem reformation the last time around.
First of all, Warfarin is pretty fucking safe. If I take an extra 5mg pill once a week, nothing happens. Out of all the thinners, it's not exactly aspirin mild, but it's not horrendously dangerous. Like all drugs, bodies react differently and while I'm ridiculously allergic to tetracycline, I'm middle of the road for reactions to warfarin (over 30 years of it). It's always shock and awe so a news story can give infotainment. Within my lifetime thinners have gained a lot of traction (due to aging boomers). Look up replacements for warfarin. It's big money and the idea that I'll be on warfarin for the rest of my life is unrealistic. Yes I'll be on something, but that's par for a mechanical valve.
The prosthetic design he came up with, is for his specific problem, weak aortic tissue which involves the stem. As mentioned in the article, a prosthetic aorta isn't a new idea. I'm not exactly sure it's any better an idea than it used to be, nor is anyone else, with a sample size of 30ish. The meat of the story is how the prosthetic is customized. Scan, 3d model, manufacture, affordably. That is pretty radical, from the perspective of current internal medicine. This whole thing sounds like a medical device ad. What I'm more interested in, aortic valves and thinners, they demonize or don't talk about at all. Pity.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
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Everyone knows me.
Well. This is amazing, though PET is well known for its possible thrombosis within 10 years post-surgery. Maybe he would need a materials scientist when designed for this.
Someone should get him a plague that says Putting Your Heart into Design and an award... just amazing.
software engineer!
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Okay, I'm a big fan of good engineering and all, but you gotta have some SERIOUSLY heavy-metal nards to be the first guy on the table for your own device for something like this!
Talk about putting your money where your mouth is!
Kudos and major man points!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
DITYS Mods
I'm on it.
the root of the aorta is the most elastic part of a very elastic vessel, and transmitting the higher pressure downstream (which his aorta-corset will do)
I'm not a medic but I am a physicist and what you say does not make sense from a physics point of view. If you take a bulge in a pipe containing a flowing liquid and squeeze it back down to the diameter of the rest of the pipe you do not increase the pressure lower down. In fact, if anything, you will reduce it because the narrower pipe will have a larger pressure drop along it due to viscous flow.
This is not the same as squeezing a closed, static system, like a balloon where squeezing it at one point reduces the volume considerable which does increase the pressure causing the unrestricted part to bulge. Yes, technically there is a volume change by restricting the aorta but surely this is only a small fraction of the total circulatory system and even then wouldn't this just cause the body to eventually reduce the amount of blood in circulation by that amount?
So unless, I have over simplified something (not taking account of the pulsed flow for example), I don't see from a purely physics perspective how it would make the pressure lower down any higher and so make the situation worse. There may be medical reasons for for increased concern but not the pressure reason you state above.
It's a perineum gangrene (pubic area) acording to the internet. Grangrenes are painful rotting of living tissue and require amputation lest you get infected from the necrotic tissue; I suppose its picture has lots of black tissue where you expect skin colors, pus, gore, lots of rotting and hanging skin, and unkempt pubic hairs, and badly decayed sexual organs; male and female.
We see tons of hearts on TV, and they're beating --not rotting-- while being operating on, unhealthy as they may be at the moment. No, there's no need to see a picture of your proposed comparison to sober up. But thanks for letting us inspect how bad things can get.
talk about packing your own parachute...
Engineers don't have wives.
But the Sheep will love it I bet.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I looks on to this story with stern face.. momentarily later, i cries freely. I salutes you, Tal Golesworthy. You should win Nobel Prize for this kind of stuff! Also, you made me consider my major by looking more into engineering in university!
Just a few comments, and all the negative comments already: big deal, there is nothing new here.
You know what, when I hear news like that, it really gives me more confidence in technical people (engineers, scientists, geeks, etc). The guy got a heart problem, he got the skills (with the help of doctors and others, probably) to design the best solution for himself, and in the meantime, for other people too. And guess what, he even got the ball to install it on himself first. And it seems to work just fine. What can be more cool, more geeky, more nerdy than that? Sure, it's only "a small sample of 30ish", as someone said here. So what? Even if this solution only applies to one person, it is still a fucking cool solution.
For me, I'd like to hear news like that everyday, that's news for nerds, stuff that matters. If I had kids, I would tell them this, and other similar stories, as bed-time stories everyday.
they say the romans made aquaduct engineers stand under the arches they'd built when the sluices were first opened. would that more life-critical work could be made fully salient to the people doing it....
Media that can be recorded and distributed can be recorded and distributed.
-kfg
Homer: What if instead of donating one of my old worn out kidneys, I gave grandpa that artificial kidney I invented...
Marge: Oh Homer, that was just a beer can with a whistle glued to it...
Monstar L
This is the take home message of this whole article:
Golesworthy believes that projects such as this demonstrate that the interface between engineers and the rest of the world isn’t functioning in the way it should. ’When it does function, huge advances can be made in a very short time period, on very little money,’ he said. ’We have changed the world for people with aortic dilation and we have done it on a fraction of the cost.’
In May 2004, Golesworthy became the first recipient of his own invention after undergoing surgery at the Royal Brompton Hospital.
In May 2004...? Kudos to the guy and all, but this "news" is older than Youtube. Bush was still in his first term of office, and Slashdot had a usable interface.
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This is an anomaly. The medical community(doctors in particular) doesn't cotton to these sorts of antics from outsiders. Just wait to this becomes more widely known amongst the Doctor fraternity. It will become like mid-wifery - a fringe practice prone to potentially costing your baby its life.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Warfarin is a cheap drug and does not seem to affect one's health, even long-term (comparing notes with a friend who is on a lifelong prescription due to heart valve replacement). It however IS quite a b*tch for someone who loves to tinker in the workshop or garden. The slightest cut or scrape tends to bleed and bleed and bleed and .... When dressing in the morning, apart from the phone, keys, wallet, and handkerchief, I also made sure I packed a box of bandages.
I'm not sure I would go to the lengths of inventing my own medical device just to get around that nuisance.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
With all the stories we've had on here about the Red Cross suing game makers for use of their logo, has Slashdot really just put a Red Cross logo on all its health articles?
...spent playing with my RepRap might get useful at some point! ;)
This man has a level 1 deer stalking certificate on his CV. He knows what he's doing.
when he gets a cease and desist order from some submarine patent holder that vaguely mentions something similar.
So many losers or old technology still in medicine, that someone having no real knowledge of the body, uses his skill from another trade, to figure something out, better then what is there now....thinking outside the box (and the local peninsula I see).
Amazing, good for him, and now he will be rich, and can relax, as he starts to figure out how to create a synthetic heart.
One of the problems with warfarin is that there is a lot of variability between patients. The main clearance enzyme for warfarin, CYP2C9, has reduced function in around roughly 25% of patients due to genetic polymorphisms. The target for warfarin, VKORC1, is highly variable due to genetics and the substrate concentrations, vitamin K, can vary greatly with dietary intake. Warfarin also has a narrow therapeutic window. If concentrations are too high there can be bleeding problems and at concentrations too low it's ineffective.
The end result is that the initial warfarin dosing can be extremely variable and requires close therapeutic monitoring when starting a new patient on the treatment. It's a far cry from something like aspirin where there is a pretty good idea of what dose a patient will need. A drug company producing something similar to warfarin that wasn't subject to such high genetic variability would be clinically preferred due to lower health care costs in starting treatment on new patients. That said, when you're properly dosed warfarin is pretty damn effective.
Talk about eating your own dogfood.
I'm not only the inventor of this implant, but I'm also a client.
Apparently my way of thinking is a little different. What the hell is wrong with the British medical system if this engineer with no medical background has to develop his own medical treatment?
I'd like to hear about the legalities of doing this. Medical implants are regulated by the FDA in the US and it seems quite likely any doctor going along with a homebuilt implant would end up fined and losing his license. Did this guy have to jump through any regulatory hoops?