Engineering:Blood pump

Figure 1 of US Patent 12753

The blood pump was patented in 1855 by Porter and Bradley and was hand operated. A modification first named surgical pump, designed and manufactured by E. E. Allen in 1887, was intended for direct blood transfusion. Truax, who also distributed and promoted the Allen pump with one roller, developed the first double roller pump in 1899. In the following decades, several researchers, including Beck, Van Allen, Bayliss and Müller as well as Henry and Jouvelet, refined the apparatus and recommended the use of roller pumps for blood transfusion and other applications. After further modifications made by DeBakey in 1934, and application of this pump in one of the first heart-lung machines constructed by Gibbon, DeBakey's name became inseparably attached to this type of pump. For perfusion experiments, an electrically powered roller pump was first used by Fleisch in 1935. Today, the roller pump is the most frequently used blood pump for cardiopulmonary bypass worldwide, having prevailed against the early pulsatile tube compression pumps and ventricular pumps. In recent years, centrifugal pumps have increasingly competed with roller pumps as systemic blood pumps for cardiopulmonary bypass and have become the preferred arterial pump in a variety of centers. Application of mechanical cardiac assistance has evolved from nonpulsatile roller pump support, followed by an era of pulsatile ventricular pumps to the rediscovery of the nonpulsatile flow mode with modern axial flow pumps.

An extracorporeal blood pump may be safer than the Jarvik artificial heart for keeping some patients alive while they await heart transplants. Since October 1985, the hospital has implanted 15 Jarvik hearts to keep dying patients alive until human donor hearts could be found, more than any other American medical institution.

Permission From Government: The United States Food and Drug Administration granted the hospital permission about a week ago to add Novacor pumps to its stock on a case-by-case, experimental basis. Unlike the air-driven Jarvik device, which replaces a patient's diseased heart, the Novacor pump is inserted in the pelvic area beneath the abdominal muscles. The patient's own heart is left intact, which may minimize the threat of infection, Dr. Griffith said.

Both the Jarvik and Novacor devices are tethered by hoses to bulky power sources outside the patient's body. The Novacor device takes over the function of the organ's left ventricle, the main pumping chamber. If the right ventricle is damaged, an artificial heart is the only option as a bridge until a human heart is available. The pump, which Novacor designates as a left ventricular assist device, was first used in 1984 at Stanford University. The polyurethane pump has since been used nine other times worldwide, said Dr. Peer Portner, president of Novacor. Five patients are still alive.

Commonly used extracorporeal blood pumps

The Bio-Pump Plus centrifugal blood pump is recognized worldwide as the market leader in centrifugal extracorporeal blood pumps. The first human use of the Bio-Pump for total by-pass was performed at the Texas Heart Institute in 1976. The surgeon was Dr. Denton Cooley and the perfusionists were Allan Robinson of BioMedicus Inc. and Charles Reed of the Texas Heart Institute.