Friday, July 20, 2007

Heart & Diabetes Center

This week, our program made an excursion to my most favorite location yet—The heart and diabetes center. During the visit, I remained in the auditorium, and heard a lecture on devices designed for cardiovascular medicine, such as ventricular assist devices.

The sole purpose of mechanical devices is to provide a bridge to transplant for victims of heart disease. Heart tranplantation is a very important predicament in which our speaker devotes a lot of his time. One of the most recent techniques integrated into organ tranplant, is OCS. In OCS, warm blood is pumped throught the heart in the time period between owners, to ensure the heart can stay outside the body as long as possible. As for devices, the LVAD (or left ventricular assist device) is commonly found in patients suffering from congestive heart failure. After our presentation, the doctors showed us a few of the models, including a few centrifuge pumps that perform non-pulsatile flow and other pumps that perform pulsatile flow.

Overall, I really enjoyed the heart and diabetes center. I hope that I can one day specialize in cardiovascular medicine, and use that my knowledge to work with other biomedical engineers to create the next generation of heart devices.

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