The heart is printed by a research team from the Higher Technical School of Zurich in Switzerland - it was there that experts with the help of 3D printing technology printed an artificial heart made of silicone.
Other scientists have long begun to print organs on 3D printers, some even attempted to print the circulatory system, but the heart is much more difficult to make. No one has yet succeeded in printing an exact copy of the human heart, moreover, scientists do not yet know how to approach this, but they are trying, working and trying something new.
Researchers from Zurich say that their heart becomes unusable after only 3,000 thousand cuts, which is about half an hour of work. Nevertheless, it looks quite realistic, and it functions in a manner similar to a real heart, quite coping with the transfer of fluid, similar in density to blood.
The heart weighs 400 grams and consists of a left and right ventricle with an additional chamber, which with the help of compressed air is inflated and deflated, while pumping fluid.
Scientists believe that one should not stop at what has been accomplished, so they will continue to explore the possibilities of three-dimensional printing and use this and other technologies to print the organs of the cardiovascular system. Even if everything is not going very smoothly now, then in the future the situation may certainly change.
“We want to create an artificial heart that would be as close to the present as possible so that it can even be transplanted to a patient,” says one of the researchers at the ETH Zurich group.
Modern artificial hearts are usually used as a temporary option that allows the patient to wait for a donor heart transplant, but donors are often not enough, so for many people a full-fledged artificial heart could be an excellent option.
The article is based on materials .
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