Dead to rights

I am sure that most of you have heard about artificial hearts and are familiar with how they work, which is essentially by mimicking the heart, beat, chambers and all. Some of you may also be familiar with ventricular assist devices or VAD's, which are typically implanted into the left ventricle as an L-VAD, or the right as an R-VAD, and sometimes even both (a dual-VAD) if the case is particularly severe but these, as it says in their name, are merely assist devices and though they do essentially take on all of the pumping responsibilities of the ventricle that they are attached to or implanted in and the heart is still present, at least until recently that is. Two doctors, from Texas no less, recently attached two centrifugal VAD pumps together rather than implanting them separately on either side of the heart and implanted them as a full heart replacement in a terminally ill amyloidosis patient with less than 12 hours to live, the surgery was a totall success and kept him alive for a month before his liver and kidneys shut down due to his disease. An interesting consequence of this is that he was living with no normal heart function, namely a pulse, which the doctors described in referring to one of their animal subjects as not living by every metric they have to analyze patients. This is being called the first continuous flow artificial heart and the doctors are hoping that it will revolutionize the current approaches to heart replacement technology.

http://www.npr.org/2011/06/13/137029208/heart-with-no-beat-offers-hope-of-new-lease-on-life