Roughly 1 in 2 wearers of ventricular assist devices are diagnosed with an infection. The reason for this is the thick cable for the power supply. ETH Zurich researchers have now developed a solution to mitigate this problem.
For many patients waiting for a donor heart, the only way to live a decent life is with the help of a pump attached directly to their heart. This pump requires about as much power as a TV, which it draws from an external battery via a seven-millimeter-thick cable. The system is handy and reliable, but it has one big flaw: Despite medical treatment, the point at which the cable exits the abdomen can be breached by bacteria.
ETH Zurich researcher and engineer Andreas Kourouklis is working to soon make this problem a thing of the past. With the support of ETH Zurich Professor Edoardo Mazza and physicians from the German Heart Center in Berlin, Kourouklis has developed a new cable system for heart pumps that doesn’t cause infections. The findings are published in the journal Biomaterials Advances.
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