Health News

New Bionic Heart Beats Without A Pulse

New Bionic Heart

While the average human heart beats 42 million times per year, scientists at the Texas Heart Institute say that the perfect bionic heart is not only within their reach, but it doesn’t beat.

The BiVACOR team lead by Australian researcher Daniel Timms has developed a working prototype for their heartbeat-free device, which has been integrated into large animals who have shown the ability to walk on a treadmill and live for a month prior to the team culling them in order to examine the bionic heart’s effect on their brain, liver and other organs.

BiVACOR is a Houston-based company which is headquartered at the Texas Heart Institute (THI). The company’s chief medical officer, Dr. William Cohn, indicated that the company’s new working prototype comes as a result of the notion that a mechanical heart with a lot of moving parts would quickly wear out under the stress of 42 million beats per year.

Dr. Cohn was quoted by ABC News as having said that the device, “in many respects,”  has managed to perform “better than any artificial heart” that’s been developed within the last 50 years.

The device has performed in many respects better than any artificial heart anybody has come up with in the last 50 years […] first legitimate shot on goal for a permanent mechanical replacement for the failing human heart.

Timms, an Australian researcher, and his team relocated to Houston from around all over the world after THI opted to provide them a new home for their research project. Now, the company and its team has managed to develop their working prototype which Cohn claims “works beautifully throughout” the kidney and lung.

Kidney function, lung function, everything works beautifully throughout

The device is roughly half the size of an average soda can. Inside, it contains a spinning disk with fins which is suspended by two magnetic fields which prevent it from touching anything. It spins at a rate of 2,000 to 3,000 times per minute and micro-adjusts its disk 20,000 times per second in order to ensure that the disk remains level.

It also adjusts the balance 20 times per second in order to compensate for times when the right side is working harder than the left or vice versa.

In other coverage of new medical devices here on Immortal News, researchers at Colombia University developed a $35 smartphone device which tests for HIV and syphilis in just 15 minutes.

With over 4,000 people currently waiting for heart transplants in the United States alone, what do you think the chances are that this company’s new bionic heart will prove to be a success if it ever makes it to the marketplace?

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