MIT engineer of Indian origin creates robotic replica of the heart’s right chamber
The right ventricle is one of the four chambers of the heart, along with the left ventricle and the left and right atrium. Of the four chambers, the left ventricle is the heavy lifter, because its thick, cone-shaped musculature is built to pump blood throughout the body.
New York: A team of American engineers, led by a person of Indian descent, has developed a robotic replica of the heart’s right ventricle that mimics the beating and blood-pumping action of living hearts. The realistic model developed by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) could help develop better heart implants and shed light on understudied heart conditions.
The right ventricle is one of the four chambers of the heart, along with the left ventricle and the left and right atrium. Of the four chambers, the left ventricle is the heavy lifter, because its thick, cone-shaped musculature is built to pump blood throughout the body.
“The right ventricle is particularly susceptible to dysfunction in the intensive care unit, especially in patients receiving mechanical ventilation,” says Manisha Singh, a postdoc at MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES).
“The robotic right ventricular simulator (RRV) may be used in the future to study the effects of mechanical ventilation on the right ventricle and to develop strategies to prevent right heart failure in these vulnerable patients,” she added.
In the paper, which appeared in the journal Nature Cardiovascular Research, the team described a model that includes real heart tissue explanted from the right ventricle of a pig and treated. The team then placed a silicone wrap around it, which acted as a soft, synthetic myocardium or muscle lining.
Within this lining, the team embedded several long, balloon-like tubes, encircling the real heart tissue, at positions that the team determined through computational modeling were optimal for reproducing the contractions of the ventricle. The researchers connected each tube to a control system, which they then set to inflate and deflate each tube at a rate that mimicked the real rhythm and movement of the heart.
“Conventional instruments often fail to capture the complex mechanics and dynamics of the right ventricle, leading to potential misdiagnoses and inadequate treatment strategies,” Singh said.
The artificial ventricle can be tuned to mimic healthy and diseased states. The team manipulated the model to simulate conditions of right ventricular dysfunction, including pulmonary hypertension and myocardial infarction. They also used the model to test cardiac equipment. For example, the team implanted a mechanical valve to repair a naturally faulty valve and then observed how the ventricle’s pumping changed in response.
The team said the new robotic right ventricle, or RRV, could be used as a realistic platform to study right ventricular diseases and test devices and therapies aimed at treating these conditions.