Heart failure (HF) is a condition in which the heart’s ability to fill or pump a adequate amount of blood is impaired. It can be caused by a number of factors including hypertension (high blood pressure), valve failure, coronary artery disease, and many more things. In the figure below, heart failure is shown to be caused by thickened myocardium (myocarditis), which may be a direct result of a viral infection that can cause the muscle to become inflamed. Almost 2% of the American population has heart failure and even with the best therapy, HF still has an annual mortality of 10%.

Treatment of HF depends on the stage of the disease’s progression and is rated on a scale from case I to case IV. The five year survival rate of patients in stage IV is only 20%, therefore this is considered severe heart failure. There are several minimally invasive devices used in HF treatment. The most common treatment device is an artificial pacemaker (shown below), which successfully prevents about 50% of all heart failures from re-occurring. Another treatment option for HF that is extreme is a heart transplant. This is called the “Gold Standard” treatment because it is the best to use, however the availability of donors is slowly declining while the number of patients who need a transplant is steadily rising. Only about 2200 heart transplants are preformed every year.

The ideal solution would be an artificial heart…In 1985, at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), the first artificial heart was implanted. Five years later, UPMC was the first medical institution to release a patient with a ventricular-assist device (VAD) (shown below). Today, VADs called positive displacement pumps are the leading treatment therapy for HF patients. Dr. Marc Simon presented the idea of positive displacement pumps at the BMES Conference and spoke of future improvement for these devices. He announced that second and third generation prototypes are currently underway in many institutions and will be ready for release soon. Dr. Simon discussed that there is an ideal period during HF in which it is ideal to implant there devices into the patient in order to maximize recovery success. There is a certain point in HF in which an acute, catastrophic event leads to sudden progression of the disease, eventually leading the patient to death. The closer researchers are able to pinpoint the time immediately prior to this turn of events to implant the device, the greater the patient’s chances are for survival.

-Amy