One lucky man in France has the honor of being the first human to have a self-regulating artificial heart beating in his chest. Inventor/cardiac surgeon Alain Carpentier invented the Carmat, an artificial heart that is far different than those that have been in use for decades. Standard artificial hearts beat at a constant rate no matter what its user is doing. That means that even if a patient is doing strenuous physical activity, the heart won’t beat faster and the person will become fatigued very quickly.

The Carmat, on the other hand, contains miniature embedded sensors that will recognize the need for increased blood flow and, using a proprietary algorithm, increase the rate of its pumping. The first Carmat model is a little larger and a lot heavier than a human heart – it weighs around two pounds and is too large for 14 percent of men and 80 percent of women. A smaller model is in the works, one that will hopefully be able to benefit even more patients.

The heart is powered by an external lithium-ion battery pack that the patient wears. A fuel cell may be incorporated in future versions of the heart. As for the 75-year-old French man who is now equipped with the bionic heart, he is awake and communicating and doing well. The Carmat heart has a life expectancy of around five years, while traditional artificial hearts can be expected to last for approximately four years.

(via: Reuters)

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In 2009, a company called Organovo came up with what, at the time, sounded like an insane goal: they wanted to make machines that could print human organs. The printed organs could then be used as ransplants so that patients would no longer have to wait for donors. Their amazing dream of creating human organs with machines has finally come true – in a way. The company announced that they have successfully created three miniature bioprinted human livers.

The livers, of course, are not ready to be stuck into a person just yet. These little organs are a mere four millimeters across and just half a millimeter deep, but they can be used for testing in a way that no artificial liver ever has. They perform most of the functions of biologically-produced livers and can stay alive and viable for up to five days. In contrast, the liver tissues currently used for testing and research only stay alive for about two days and can’t perform nearly as many functions.

These tiny livers are a huge step forward in research. Now diseases can be intentionally introduced to the liver cells and medications administered in real time. Researchers can actually see what would happen to a real liver were these types of events to take place inside a human body. Organovo isn’t giving up on their ultimate goal just yet, though: they still hope to create full-size livers that can be transplanted into humans who need them.

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The human race is evolving, and it has little to do with nature. It is down to our constant curiosity and our refusal to be content with the way things have always been. Neil Harbisson, the stylish gentleman above, is a recognized cyborg. His modification has to do with his inability to see colors. From birth, Harbisson has seen only black and white. But in 2004, he began wearing an eyeborg, a device that allows him to “hear” colors.

The eyeborg creates a kind of artificial synesthesia: a condition that causes some people to experience sensory stimuli through different senses than ordinary. For example, synesthetes may experience numbers spatially or, as in Harbisson’s case, they may experience colors as sounds.

Harbisson’s voluntary artificial synesthesia allows him to experience the world in a way that no one else does. He associates certain frequencies with certain colors, allowing him to “paint” with sounds. Using the sonochromatic scales above, he creates unique and surprisingly lovely soundscapes that let the rest of us share his unusual experience of colors for just a few moments.

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Although still far from perfect, artificial hearts are an invaluable resource for patients who would surely die without them. They aren’t exactly commonplace – being reserved for temporary use in people who have no chance of survival otherwise and who are awaiting transplants – but the technology is improving year by year. Everyone who has benefited from an artificial heart has the one in these pictures to thank: it is the world’s first functional artificial heart.

The heart was implanted in a man named Haskell Carp on April 4, 1969. It pumped his blood and kept him alive for nearly three days until a biological donor heart took its place. The amazing contraption looks more like a piece of WWII-era soldier gear than a finely-tuned piece of medical equipment. It is rugged and functional, though not exactly sophisticated-looking.

The world’s first artificial heart now resides in a jar of formaldehyde at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. It is not on regular display, but rather kept in one of the vast storage rooms behind the scenes. It’s a shame, because this single piece of medical technology ushered in a whole new era of incredible medical advances in the areas of prosthetics, artificial organs, and various life-extending treatments.

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Who says the robot assimilation will be all ray guns and smoldering Earth? Maybe the robots will take over the human race from the inside out. We joke, of course – the medical cybernetics field is no real threat to the human race. In fact, these three amazing artificial organs can one day save countless lives.

The Biolung from MC3 is an extremely compact, functional artificial lung. A far cry from the iron lungs of decades past, this device is small enough to be implanted in the patient’s chest, helping them to recover from injury or illness or keeping them alive until donor lungs are available. The Biolung is currently being reviewed for approval by the FDA.

You certainly wouldn’t win any fashion showdowns wearing this contraption, but for people with kidney disease it could be life-changing. The wearable artificial kidney would replace long, tedious and tiring dialysis treatments during which patients are stuck in a chair or bed. Patients with a wearable kidney would be able to go about their normal daily activities without interruption – much as they did with their own natural kidneys. The device performs dialysis 24/7 and weighs just 10 pounds, including batteries. The technology is still being developed, but with so many people behind the idea it’s moving along quickly.

The first artificial stomach was created by a team of British scientists back in 2006 for around $1.8 million. It’s not meant to be strapped to a human body to digest food; rather, it’s the most sophisticated way we have to study how digestion really works. Previous stomach models haven’t functioned in a very realistic way, so this is a bona fide breakthrough. The artificial stomach can “digest” around 24 ounces of food (about half the capacity of a human stomach) and will help scientists understand how the human body breaks down and metabolizes food. The applications are vast: obesity cures, more efficient diabetes treatments, and supplements or medications that can be more precisely time-released in the gut.

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