I’m a research and development engineer working on the development of a heart valve that’s implanted into the body’s heart.
It’s called transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) or transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR), its the replacement of the aortic valve of the heart through the blood vessels (as opposed to valve replacement by open heart surgery). The replacement valve is delivered via one of several access methods: transfemoral (in the upper leg), transapical (through the wall of the heart), subclavian (beneath the collar bone) and direct aortic (through a minimally invasive surgical incision into the aorta).
The main idea is so you can have a valve implanted without open heart surgery, which is a difficult procedure and gas a very long recovery time for the patient.
The team I work with developed a delivery system with the valve attached. This delivery systems job is to get the cable to the heart with just one incision made in the body.
Google Lotus valve and Boston Scientific and you will see what it looks like.
We build prototypes and need to test them on the bench before they ever go into animals or people. We have to make sure by our bench tests that the product is safe. So our bench test need to replicate the human anatomy as close as possible. So we have plastic replicates of vessels and the heart all over the labs to test our devices on. For example, We test the forces to get these devices to the heart to make sure we don’t puncture a vessel on route to the heart.
Hope this makes sense, shoot another question if you need more info.
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