Four science breakthroughs for the heart

The past year was big on breakthroughs for heart health. From dead hearts beating to bubbles scrubbing away at clogged arteries, these discoveries are, well, not heart-stopping. They’re quite the opposite.

1. Dead hearts start beating again

A heart transplant team in St. Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney was the first to transplant hearts from deceased circulatory death (DCD) donors—or donors whose hearts already stopped beating. The dead heart was transported and revived by a device from TransMedics.

TransMedics’ Organ Care System (OCS) is the only device that can maintain donor organs to preserve organs outside of the human body from the time the organ is removed from the donor until its ready to be transplanted into a patient.

Before the device, DCD donors can donate other organs but the heart. Heart tissue rapidly deteriorates when the heart stops beating and blood is no longer being circulated around the heart.

“The ability to safely transplant a donor heart from DCD donors could be a paradigm shift to potentially increase the pool of viable donor hearts to help more patients suffering from end-stage heart failure, “said Dr. Waleed Hassanein, President and CEO of TransMedics, Inc. “The publication of this successful case series creates a scientific foundation to a new and large potential source of heart transplants for patients that need a heart transplant to treat their end-stage heart failure” said Dr. Hassanein.

2. Doctors detect heart problems without touch

University of Waterloo researchers developed the first portable system that monitors a patient’s blood flow at multiple arterial points simultaneously and without direct contact with the skin.

The device makes it easier to monitor older patients who have burns, communicable diseases, or babies in neonatal intensive care.

“Traditional systems in wide use now take one blood-pulse reading at one spot on the body. This device acts like many virtual sensors that measure blood-flow behaviour on various parts of the body. The device relays measurements from all of these pulse points to a computer for continuous monitoring,” said Robert Amelard, a PhD candidate in systems design engineering at Waterloo and recipient of the Alexander Graham Bell Canada Graduate Scholarship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. “By way of comparison, think of measuring the traffic flow across an entire city rather than through one intersection.”

3. Heart scans become faster, safer

Oxford University researchers plan to replace MRI scanning with a technique that’s faster, safer, and brings out clearer scans.

Researchers are using hydrogen atoms to create a pixel-by-pixel map of the heart, called a T1-map, which allows examination of healthy and diseased heart tissue in greater detail than before.

With T1 mapping, patients don’t need to beinjected with Adenosine and Gadolinium, as done in MRIs.

Dr Alexander Liu, who leads the research with the guidance of his supervisors — Dr. Vanessa Ferreira, Dr. Stefan Piechnik and Professor Neubauer (the centre director), explained: ‘We wanted to see if using T1 mapping can give clearer, more clinically-useful results compared to traditional MRI scans that require injections of contrast agents.”

“On traditional MRI scans, doctors are judging relative shades of light and dark on a scan, and even the most experienced specialists can disagree on what the image is showing them. T1 maps provide an objective number, which can be coded in colours, and may be less subjective. Additionally, patients with severe kidney failure — who are usually at higher risk for heart disease — cannot clear Gadolinium and often are unable to benefit from a full MRI scan of the heart. T1-maps can potentially solve this problem in the future.” She added.

Further studies are being done before the T1 technique can be applied in hospitals.

4. Microbubbles scrub clogged hearts

Bubbles just 1/100th the size of a human hair can clear out clogged hearts, according to a research by the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering in the US.

These microbubbles were already successful in pig-heart trials and clinical trials are beginning with human hearts.

The treatment consists of injected microbubbles which then agitated by ultrasound. The rapid churning of the bubbles acts to chip away at the clot. “The combination of microbubbles chipping away outside and inside the clot is like poking holes in the clot and turning it into Swiss cheese allowing blood to reach the heart muscle,” Senior author Thomas R. Porter, M.D., at the University of Nebraska Medical Center

In the animal model, the treatment both with and without a low dose of the clot-busting drug tPA improved heart function and reduced the size of infarct (damaged area of heart muscle). Potentially, the promising treatment could be rapidly administered to heart attack patients arriving at the emergency room (or even while in the ambulance), and could preserve heart muscle before patients receive invasive interventions to open blocked arteries.

Category: Technology & Devices, Top Story