A heart that doesn't beat but still works fine

Things that were previously even far from thought have been made possible today, only due to advancements in technology. Way back, there were no sure-shot ways of treating malfunctioning hearts but now a team of scientists have developed a bionic heart which does not beat. Chief medical officer, William Cohn of BiVACOR, the company working on the new bionic heart, said that the average human heart has to beat 42 million times a year, which means that if it were replaced with a machine with a lot of moving parts, it would quickly wear out, the ABC News reported. (Read: USFDA approves Luke Skywalker-like prosthetic robotic arm!)

Cohn noted that the device, which has only one moving part that propels blood through the body instead of pumping it, has performed, in many respects, better than any artificial heart anybody has come up with in the last 50 years; adding that they consider it the first legitimate shot on goal for a permanent mechanical replacement for the failing human heart. When Australian researcher, Daniel Timms, came to him three years ago looking for a new home for his project, Cohn said he knew it was something special, even though Timms didn't have a working prototype at the time. (Read: Successful heart transplant patients living 20 years longer than before)

Cohn added that researchers around the world had been working on the project for Timms without pay and they all relocated to Houston. He continued that the BiVACOR team has now developed a working prototype and put it into large animals and they are able to walk on a treadmill and live for a month before the team culls them to examine the heart's effect on their liver, brain and other organs. Kidney function, lung function, everything works beautifully throughout. (Read: 6-day-old premature baby has youngest heart transplant)

Cohn said that the heart, which is about half the size of a soda can, has a spinning disk with fins suspended by two magnetic fields so that it's never touching anything and spins 2,000 to 3,000 times a minute. The disk micro-adjusts 20,000 times a second to keep the disk spinning flat; because the right side of your heart works harder when you cough, and the left side of your heart works harder when you exercise, it also adjusts the balance 20 times a second.

Image source: ANI

Image source: Getty Images

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