The Man With the Battery-Powered Heart

In some ways, a VAD is nothing more than another implantable device, much like an insulin pump for diabetics or a cochlear implant for the deaf. I know the heart is just a muscle, and I have held a cadaver’s still heart in my hands and felt its inanimate weight. And I know, too, that as time passes, VADs will become smaller, as devices do, and one day they might be no clumsier than pacemakers.

LVAD Emergencies

These patients are super-complicated, luckily I got Zack Shinar, MD from Sharp Memorial in San Diego to try to wade through the morass.

The LVAD: Walking, Talking … and Pulseless

You walk into your next code and it’s a man in his 60s who collapsed on his way to his cardiologist’s office. His wife insists that he doesn’t need CPR because he has a kind of artificial heart, an LVAD. No one in the department has ever seen a patient with one of these before.

Troubleshooting the Left Ventricular Assist Device

As the number of patients with refractory heart failure grows, so too does the likelihood that patients with a left ventricular assist device will present for emergent care.

An Engineering Feat Gives Hearts Extra Life

The new technology allows for real-time, remote monitoring of implantable devices, years of added life for patients, and flexibility to travel without a physician nearby.

If the Tin Man Actually Had a Heart, It'd Look Like This

A robotic heart points the way to a future where soft robots help us heal.

Preparing patients and families to manage ventricular assist devices

Because problems with VADs can be life-threatening, families need extensive training in managing the device and its external controller at home.

The device kept him alive, but was the pain and suffering worth it?

Robert and Beverly Stanford, who live outside Houston, volunteered to tell us their story as part of a research project we have undertaken to help patients decide whether they should undergo treatment. LVAD can save lives, but doctors don’t know how many complications might be expected for those who suffer from other conditions as well.

This New Robot Will Help Keep Hearts Pumping

These days, doctors keep a heart pumping blood with something called a ventricular assist device. This is a pump external to the body that helps ferry blood around when the heart just can’t manage on its own. Problem is, because blood is flowing through machinery, the patient has to take blood thinners to make sure the works don’t get gummed up. And doctors don’t like putting people on blood thinners if they can avoid it. This new robot is incorporated right into the heart, and acts to encourage the organ’s normal function.

This soft robot hugs your heart to help keep it pumping

A team lead by engineers at Harvard University is testing a silicone sleeve that slips over the bottom of the heart like a cocoon, then inflates and deflates to squeeze the heart and give it a powerful beat. Proof-of-concept studies showed that the soft robot restored normal blood flow in six pigs whose hearts had stopped.

When the Body Fails, Tech Takes Over

The left ventricular assist device (LVAD) has gone from being a bridge to a heart transplant to a long-term therapy option. An LVAD helps the heart pump blood to the rest of the body, thereby taking a lot of stress off of the heart.

“Liberated from LVAD support”: One patient’s story

Jackson was leaning on her Stanford doctors to find a way to get her back in the water. She asked her cardiologist, Dipanjan Banerjee, MD, to consider allowing her to swim in a wetsuit. Banerjee did her one better. It had become apparent to him that she could be one of that small percentage of LVAD recipients whose heart recovers after the rest that the LVAD gives it and who no longer need the device. -