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"Cut out the heart and replace it with two turbines...
In March of 2011 Dr Bud Frazier and Dr Billy Cohn of the Texas Heart Institute removed the dying heart of patient Craig A. Lewis and successfully replaced it with a 'continuous flow' pumping device.
Without the constant beating of his heart Craig Lewis no longer possessed a detectable pulse and was effectively dead by conventional standards.
When a potential organ becomes available, the computer generates a list of possible recipients based on criteria like urgency of need, availability and the location of the patient, as well as factors like blood and tissue type. Donor hearts must come from someone who is still on life support. Gender, ethnicity and celebrity status are not factors in the computer matching. Recipients often carry pagers with them so hospitals can notify them if a donor heart becomes available. The road ahead for transplant recipients is not an easy one. They must take anti-rejection medication for the rest of their lives. Here's a look at heart transplantation, by the numbers.
2,332 - Number of Americans who had heart transplants in 2011. About 2,000 transplants take place in the U.S. each year.
4 - Number of hours it takes to transplant a heart into a recipient.
6-12 - Average number of months a patient spends on the heart transplant list.
Cont. p. 13
The rhymic contractions of his heart had been replaced instead by a continuous flow generated by the turbines of the impanted device.
The artifical heart inserted into Craig's chest was actually a combination of two pumps, typically used individually to assist one side of a partially damaged heart. In this design two turbine pumps were combined to replace the function of the left and right ventricles, to provide a continuous rather than pulsed output. See more at:
http://www.richannel.org/life-without-a-pulse