Image of the Day: Bionic Heart

A bioengineered heart made of pig and synthetic tissues beats like the real thing.

| 1 min read

Listen with Speechify

0:00

1:00

Anew robotic heart can contract and expand with a remarkably lifelike beat, researchers reported yesterday (January 29) in Science Robotics.

The researchers created the robotic heart as a tool to better test devices used to treat cardiac issues. “Regulatory testing of cardiac devices requires many fatigue tests and animal tests,” Ellen Roche assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT says in a university media release. “[The new device] could realistically represent what happens in a real heart, to reduce the amount of animal testing or iterate the design more quickly.”

In this study, the heart only simulated the left ventricle. In the future, the team wants to expand the robotic heart to include both ventricles and simulate blood moving through it.

C. Park, et al., “An organosynthetic dynamic heart model with enhanced biomimicry guided by cardiac diffusion tensor imaging,” Science Robotics, doi: 10.1126/scirobotics.aay9106, 2020.

Amy Schleunes is an intern at ...

Interested in reading more?

The Scientist ARCHIVES

Become a Member of

Receive full access to more than 35 years of archives, as well as TS Digest, digital editions of The Scientist, feature stories, and much more!

Join for free today

Already a member? Login Here

Keywords

Meet the Author

Amy Schleunes
A former intern at The Scientist, Amy studied neurobiology at Cornell University and later earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. She is a Los Angeles–based writer, editor, and communications strategist who collaborates on nonfiction books for Harper Collins and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and also teaches writing at Johns Hopkins University CTY. Her favorite projects involve sharing the insights of science and medicine.
View full profile