© ELLEN ROCHE, ET. ALA synthetic matrix of soft robotic actuators can be wrapped around a heart ventricle and inflated to squeeze and twist the heart in the same way a real heart pumps blood.
If you're unlucky enough to need a heart valve replacement, a pacemaker or an internal defibrillator, there's a new invention that could soon smooth the way.
Researchers led by Ellen Roche at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, US,
have made a "soft" robotic heart by encasing the innards of a pig heart in a pneumatic silicone shell, moulded to be a perfect replica of the original.The result is a melding of pig and polymer the team calls a "biorobotic hybrid heart". It can pump at different rates and strengths, mimicking a range of human conditions all the way from healthy exercise to heart failure.
With development, the device could mean patients waiting for heart procedures get their ticker modelled in the lab beforehand, allowing surgeons to tailor-make interventions such as valve replacements.
Down the track, even people on the list for a heart transplant could benefit.
"[W]ith further tissue engineering, we could potentially see the biorobotic hybrid heart be used as an artificial heart," says co-lead author Christopher Nguyen, from Harvard Medical School in the US.
To manufacture their robo-heart, the team carefully dissected out the lining of a pig's heart.
This bit has a
precise anatomy that is hard to imitate synthetically. There are the valves that stop blood flowing backwards, the slender fibrils that guide the valve leaflets to open and close, and the gullies or "trabeculae" that corrugate the lining of each chamber.
The researchers then took the outer, muscular layer of the heart, "unwrapped" it and laid it out flat to be scanned with a high-resolution version of MRI called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).
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