Research in the field of medicine is progressing more and more, and 3D printing helps scientists if needed.
Techniques that engineers use to create a robotic arm that can bend or rotate are also used to make more complex organs, such as the heart, and this is proven to us by researchers in Switzerland.
One of the major problems of artificial hearts is that plastic and metal mechanisms can be hard to integrate with tissue, or can produce various side effects due to unnatural movement.
An ETH team led by student student Nicholas Cohrs did what they say is the first artificial heart made of soft materials. Thus, the pumping mechanism works due to the silicone ventricles, which pump exactly like those of a real heart. There is a difference: there is no wall between the ventricles, but a chamber that swells and deflates to create the pumping action.
The heart was created with 3D printing, so researchers could create a complex internal structure even though they were based on soft materials. The whole heart is a monoblock, so no concerns arise as to how the various mechanisms would merge.
During the tests, the heart worked quite well, managing to pump a fluid similar to blood at pressures similar to those in the body. There is, however, a gift.
The heart is a concept and has not been created for a real transplant, so the materials it produces do not resist more than a few thousand beats. This means that the heart would not last for more than 30-60 minutes in one's body, but the researchers' plan is to use the materials and design to make the heart work much longer.
"As a mechanical engineer, I would not have imagined that I would ever hold a soft artificial heart," says Anastasios Petrou, a student who performed the heart tests, quoted by techcrunch.com.