NC State gurus keep hearts beating outside of the body

If NC State's athletic branches had even half the aptitude as its medical researchers, maybe then those blue boys down the road wouldn't have so much right to bang us up. Personal beefs aside, we're simultaneously stoked and amazed by a new machine crafted down in Raleigh, one that enables scientists to keep a heart pumping even after it has been removed from the body, but for research purposes only. Andrew Richards, a bright young mechanical engineering student, designed the so-called dynamic heart system, which "pumps fluid through a pig heart so that it functions in a very realistic way." Obviously, such a device has a multitude of benefits, including time / money savings compared to alternative approaches, the ability to record the inner workings of a pumping heart and scoring the creator some serious street cred in the industry. Mind-blowing video is just after the break.

[Via Neatorama]

[Jordan @ Jun 3rd 2009 11:44AM]

and its not really beating, its simulating a beating heart "very realistically". They just mimicked the mechanics of the ventricles

[wnr @ Jun 3rd 2009 11:47AM]

It's a shame. I was hopeful that the heart was actually being kept viable, which would have pretty big implications for organ transplantation. Maybe they'll get some useful research out of this.

[ZombieRace @ Jun 3rd 2009 12:58PM]

Baby steps...

[Barbaric @ Jun 3rd 2009 1:58PM]

baby steps... the next step is to get the heart of a criminal pig with an addiction to the designer drug "nuke" and build a pigborg...

[NeoJew @ Jun 3rd 2009 2:06PM]

At least it would make a cool center piece.

[Nytrojen @ Jun 3rd 2009 7:55PM]

First they gotta invent and introduce "nuke"... and then coax Peter Weller out of his cryogenic slumber to save us all once again.

[Manuel Ribeiro @ Jun 5th 2009 7:12AM]

Errrrr I detec a BIG problem there!
The PC is running Windows! It could just crash, get infected or get hacked without notice or warning... and kill the heart!
It could also decide to install updates and then reboot. Or it could decide that a warnign window of a crashing application is more important and give-it full CPU clock.

It's easy to solve thow, just code it again without using .NOT and then place a unix or linux based system running the thing ;)

[hemmy @ Jun 3rd 2009 11:45AM]

The horror... The horror...

[Stephen Selph @ Jun 3rd 2009 11:47AM]

Crap, I need to stop writing down all of my experiments down and leaving them at frat parties. I thought this was going to be my big break....

[shiftyeyedgoat @ Jun 3rd 2009 11:47AM]

Pffh, Trent Reznor's been doing this since the 90s. When you get a brain in a jar to perform cognitive thought processes, then I'll be impressed.

Also, NC State sucks. (Go Tech)

[CtrlBurn @ Jun 3rd 2009 1:18PM]

Say hey to the ladies at Tech.


Oh wait... :P

[Chuckles McGee @ Jun 3rd 2009 2:45PM]

Go DUKE

[Slick @ Jun 4th 2009 1:48AM]

I'll assume you mean Virginia Tech - the land grant school in the ACC that doesn't disappoint in athletics and still has a bad ass engineering program.

[Steve @ Jun 3rd 2009 11:47AM]

And apparently it runs windows. Gives a new meaning to blue screen of death...

[G Scott J @ Jun 3rd 2009 11:49AM]

Who knew that one day, a Dell laptop would have a heart?

[diefldrmas @ Jun 3rd 2009 11:48AM]

So thats How they are keepiong Steve Jobs alive.....WOW.


Maus

[hangfire @ Jun 3rd 2009 11:50AM]

i'm sending this link to my ex,
i'll tell that the doctors finally found her heart,

[zioncat @ Jun 3rd 2009 2:11PM]

Holy crap that was a good one. I needed that laugh.

[Adam @ Jun 3rd 2009 1:17PM]

beautiful

[Shinigami @ Jun 3rd 2009 1:41PM]

Your ex is a pig?.............

[big dan @ Jun 3rd 2009 2:13PM]

lol

[IcemanNCSU @ Jun 3rd 2009 11:50AM]

Which tech? VA, or GA?

[chanmanplanet @ Jun 3rd 2009 11:51AM]

if that can keep someone alive wirelessly then it would be cool, but then i'd be worrying about running out of hotspot - better that unlimited data plan (LMAO)... ok, sry for the lame joke.. work was too boring -__-"

[Kelly @ Jun 3rd 2009 11:54AM]

PIG HEART FAIL

[Melon @ Jun 3rd 2009 11:56AM]

Bring on the zombies, Horzine Bio-Tech here we come!!!

[jay @ Jun 3rd 2009 12:03PM]

This is soo steampunk

[Aaron @ Jun 3rd 2009 2:43PM]

this plus your comment reminded me of that Nine Inch Nails music video...

[Divya Mistry @ Jun 3rd 2009 11:59AM]

Holy cow.. er pig! This is incredible. Now of course, any mechanical engineer could've done this.. but truth be told.. No one, NO ONE.. did it before this guy!

[Sim @ Jun 3rd 2009 12:03PM]

This sort of thing has been going on for.. decades if not longer?

[Víctor @ Jun 3rd 2009 12:06PM]

This is what I call an overhyped contraption and news item. Boys, they are pumping water inside the heart, it is not beating by itself (ir misses the blood flow to feed the heart cells, so they have no energy to contract).
They could do this with a plastic bag painted red. Maybe it can be useful to study the hydrodynamics inside the heart, but as the pressure is done from the outside and not by the heart walls contracting, I wonder how realistic it can be.

[Nikoooo @ Jun 8th 2009 1:24PM]

If you pump water through a heart, it turns white... Water will "suck" out all the proteins and other compounds of your cell, thus killing it. Here they flush through some blood and that's why the heart retains its pink (chicken-like) color. You could also use a saline solution, which contains NaCl but also glucose and other nutritive elements... Works very well too.

[Speed @ Jun 3rd 2009 12:06PM]

Isolated Hearts (as they are known in the business) have been around for decades. Pharmacology research labs have them running by the dozens using rat hearts.

Readers that have completed an undergraduate vertebrate physiology lab will remember using such a rig to learn about the Frank-Starling effect.

[Geoff @ Jun 3rd 2009 1:00PM]

As a cardiac researched who graduated from NC State, went to Duke med, now at Stanford I can say this has been going on forever. Isolated heart preparations from frogs were used by Otto Frank in the late 1800's, by Starling (Dogs) around 1914 and by everyone else in the world soon thereafter. Langendoff popularized the mechanism and the solution used to keep the heart metabolically active and similar solutions have made cardiac bypass possible.

[Wwhat @ Jun 3rd 2009 5:48PM]

But nobody made a use of the idea as a heart-lung machine component, except some scifi and horror flick makers I guess.

[pikakhu @ Jun 3rd 2009 12:17PM]

This sort of thing has been around for ages. I have even toyed with one (rat heart) my self. Google Langendorff's apparatus.

[superhobo @ Jun 3rd 2009 12:24PM]

It's not even beating!

This is like...mouth to mouth, only for a dead heart.

[GaryZ @ Jun 3rd 2009 12:25PM]

PETA hypocrites will soon be at their door...

[ACEY RIOT @ Jun 3rd 2009 12:26PM]

i pictured an episode of aquateen where steve asks him to have a heart, "its right here! bwa ha ha ha ha" my name is... you get the point

[ACEY RIOT @ Jun 3rd 2009 12:27PM]

Him= dr. weird

[p3t3b2 @ Jun 3rd 2009 12:37PM]

You guys, that's not even funny, give Dick Cheney his heart back!

[Carrie @ Jun 3rd 2009 12:53PM]

It might not be beating by itself, but something like this allows researchers to get a really good look at how exactly things like valves work inside a beating heart. Blood flow, mechanisms, seeing moving parts in motion.They can do experiments with it like, "I wonder what happens when something goes wrong with this valve here" and then say "Interestiiiiing" and scribble frantically on a clipboard. Y'know, SCIENCE.

[John @ Jun 3rd 2009 12:58PM]

That's some creepy shit right there man.

[ja$on @ Jun 3rd 2009 1:15PM]

This just in- MAN WALKS ON MOON

[george @ Jun 3rd 2009 2:42PM]

Weird...this article came up just I was listening to Metric's "Help I'm Alive"
"Help I'm alive, my heart's beating like a hammer..."

[Dez @ Jun 3rd 2009 2:54PM]

Since we reanimated a frog heart chemically in my undergraduate bio class...

This just isn't that big of a deal.

[Rick @ Jun 3rd 2009 3:04PM]

it will run on windows 7?!

[Amun @ Jun 3rd 2009 3:17PM]

[Witty Terminator: Salvation joke]

[Doug @ Jun 3rd 2009 3:47PM]

So when do we start making the zombies?

[dave @ Jun 3rd 2009 4:02PM]

Looks like we finally have a power source for the T-9000 terminator.

[Richard @ Jun 3rd 2009 4:27PM]

Check it out...LabVIEW in action