Bionic Heart Model Inspired by Human Hearts

Innovation: Academia

MIT

2020

Image: lucas Favre / Unsplash / CC BY SA - Creative Commons Attribution + ShareAlike

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Liquids include water, as well as body fluids such as blood, gastric juices, nutrient-laden liquids, and more. To survive, many living systems must move such liquids within themselves or between locations. Because of their properties, liquids tend to disperse unless they are confined in some way. To address this, living systems have strategies to confine fluids for transport, and to overcome barriers such as gravity, friction, and other forces. Some of these same barriers also provide opportunities. Trees and giraffes face the same challenge: how to move fluids (water and blood, respectively) upward against gravity. But their strategies are quite different. The tree moves water using capillary action and evaporation, possibly due to water’s properties of polarity and adhesion. The giraffe’s tight skin provides pressure to assist in blood circulation. and keep blood from pooling in the legs.

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Gases of particular importance to living systems are oxygen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen. Oxygen and carbon dioxide are involved in respiration, so distributing these gases efficiently and effectively is important for a living system’s survival. However, gases are difficult to contain because they disperse easily. To accommodate this, living systems have strategies for confining gases and using gases’ properties to their advantage. For example, prairie dogs and mound-building termites build systems of tunnels and mounds that take advantage of wind to ventilate their underground homes.

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Bionic heart model from MIT mimics the way a real human heart pumps blood, allowing for more realistic testing of prosthetic valves.

Benefits

Increased efficiency
Reduced costs
Reduced testing time

Applications

Medical implants

UN Sustainable Development Goals Addressed

Goal 3: Good Health & Wellbeing

The Challenge

Heart disease is a prominent health condition around the world. As rates of heart disease increase, the demand for prosthetic heart valves and other cardiac devices will grow too. Prosthetic valves are designed to mimic a real, healthy heart and help pump blood throughout the body. However, many valves can develop issues such as leakage or failure. Current prosthetic valves must first be tested as benchtop simulations, and then tested on animal subjects before reaching humans, which is a time- and money-intensive process.

Innovation Details

The bionic heart is a real biological heart that has the tough outer tissue replaced with a soft robotic matrix of artificial heart muscles, similar to bubble wrap. The orientation of the artificial muscles mimics the pattern of the heart’s natural muscle fibers, so that when the researchers remotely inflate the bubbles, they act together to squeeze and twist the inner heart. This is similar to the way a human heart beats and pumps blood. The real biological tissues are glued to the artificial tissues with a new adhesive called TissueSil, a viscous, hydrogel-based adhesive. The entire system is wrapped in silicone to encase the hybrid heart in a uniform covering. This new heart is called a ‘biorobotic hybrid heart’, and allows for faster prosthetic valve testing and fine-tuning, significantly reducing the cost of testing and development.

Overview of the bioinspired approach to developing a biorobotic hybrid heart. Photo: Park et al./MIT.

Biological Model

The heart pumps blood by squeezing and twisting itself. The right side of the heart receives oxygen-poor blood and pumps it to the lungs, to refuel with oxygen. The left side of the heart received oxygen-rich blood and pumps it into the body.

See Related Strategy

Biological Strategy

Valves Handle High Pressures

Humans

The aortic valve in vertebrate hearts allows the tissue to expand under high pressures by having elastic properties.

References

Journal article

An organosynthetic dynamic heart model with enhanced biomimicry guided by cardiac diffusion tensor imaging

Science Robotics

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Reference

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