Researchers 3D-printed a soft artificial heart that beats like a human one

Swiss researchers have come a step closer to building to a better artificial heart. It’s a squishy prototype that’s 3D-printed from silicone. This soft artificial heart also has a chamber that fills up and deflates, mimicking the muscle contractions of a human heart. Traditional artificial hearts are made from plastic and metal, which the human body can reject. The 3D-printing method would also allow doctors to customize the size and fit of each soft artificial heart to the patient.

The Design Bias of Heart Failure

The lone artificial heart on the market fit 80 percent of men and only 20 percent of women. But the bias here is deeper than that.

An Artificial Heart Inspired by Jellyfish

It was the aquarium that sent Kit Parker down an unexpected path with his heart research. He was there with his daughter watching jellyfish pulsing through the water. The jellyfish, he realized, looked a lot like hearts pumping blood.

Artificial Heart Transplants May Be The Future Of Medicine

The precise nature of 3D printing technology certainly opens up a lot of possibilities in the medical genre, enabling a lot of acute biological procedures to carry through. Artificial organ transplantation is still almost a decade away from happening, but here’s hoping that this new technology can help shed some light into some of the more serious medical enigmas of the time.

Artificial Hearts Ticking Along Decades After Jarvik-7 Debate

The artificial heart became a media sensation in the 1980s as it both raised hopes and spread controversy. Today, its impact on medical science is still playing out in surprising ways.

How Artificial Hearts Work

Today it is fairly common for people to get artificial hearts while they wait for donor hearts. And the whole artificial heart rig has become far more portable.

How Things Work: The Artificial Heart

Contrary to popular belief, an artificial heart only replaces the two ventricles and connects to the natural atrium. Unlike the normal heart, which pumps blood to the lungs and body at same time, an artificial heart can force blood out of only one ventricle at a time.

Invention of the artificial heart

Contrary to popular public perception, the artificial heart was not invented by Dr. Robert Jarvik. Dr. Jarvik was just a child when the actual inventor began his work on the artificial heart. Doctors Willem J. Kolff, Robert Jarvik, Don B. Olsen, Michael DeBakey, John H. Gibbon, and Clarence Dennis, are among the best-known pioneering developers of heart-lung bypass machines and other mechanical heart devices. But none of them was the inventor of the artificial heart.

No Pulse: How Doctors Reinvented The Human Heart

This 10,000-rpm, no-pulse artificial heart doesn't resemble an organic heart--and might be all the better for it.

Researchers’ Quest for an Artificial Heart

But all these versions of artificial heart devices, whether they are meant to support the heart or replace it completely, are trying to copy the functions of the heart, mimicking the natural blood flow. The result is what’s called a pulsatile pump, the flow of blood going into the body like a native heart, at the average of 80 spurts a minute needed to sustain life. That’s the cause of the gentle movement you feel when you put your fingers to your wrist or your chest – your pulse, which corresponds with the beating of your heart. Today, scientists are working on a new wave of artificial hearts with one crucial difference: they don’t beat.

Scientists Grow Full-Sized, Beating Human Hearts From Stem Cells

It’s the closest we've come to growing transplantable hearts in the lab.

State-of-the Art in Artificial Hearts

A person dies of cardiovascular disease-related causes every 33 seconds. While the overall rate of heart disease in the US has shown a promising decline in recent years, one type of heart disease, heart failure, is on the increase.

The Artificial Heart: Not Just a Pump

The goal of building a safe artificial heart has frustrated bioengineers for more than four decades. At last, an end could be in sight

The Built-From-Scratch Heart

Medical researchers are getting closer to creating whole, working human hearts.

The Era of Artificial Hearts Has Begun

For the second time ever, a truly permanent artificial heart was implanted into a patient. This is just the beginning.

The First Artificial Hearts Looked Like Bongs and Hot-Dog Carts

When you hear the term "artificial heart," a certain image probably comes to mind. Maybe it’s of a plastic thingy with fake ventricles sticking out of it, or maybe it’s something closer to the heart the Tin Man received during his trip to Oz. But the funny thing about artificial hearts is that they don’t look like hearts at all.

The Total Artificial Heart

Because of their larger size, most VADs require the creation of a surgical pocket for implantation. The Total Artificial Heart does not because it occupies the space of the removed failing ventricles.

UCLA doctors remove man's heart, replace it with total artificial heart

Portable power supply allows patient to go home while he awaits new heart

With Each Operation, Artificial Hearts Show More Promise

The artificial heart acts as a bridge therapy -- a temporary measure until a patient can get off the organ donor waiting list and receive a heart transplant.