The total artificial heart is a mechanical device designed to replace a person's true heart when he suffers from late-stage heart failure .
The intervention for his system can have an incredibly long duration: from 5 to 9 hours !
In this long period of time, a team of doctors and specialists - including cardiac surgeons, cardiologists, nurses, anesthesiologists, medical engineers etc. - is dedicated to:
- Anesthetize the patient and make him unconscious . Total anesthesia, which is performed by a doctor who specializes in similar practices, is the first operational step and allows the patient to feel no pain whatsoever.
- Monitor the patient's vital signs . After anesthesia, the patient is connected to medical equipment for measuring heart rate, pressure, oxygen levels and breathing. The nurses are supervised by the anesthesiologist.
- Connect the patient to an artificial ventilation machine . It is essential whenever total anesthesia is performed.
- Perform thoracotomy . It is the procedure for opening the chest, which allows free access to the heart. Starting from the thoracotomy, the fate of the operation passes into the hands of cardiac surgeons and their assistants.
- Disconnect the heart from the afferent and efferent vessels and connect these to the heart-lung machine for extracorporeal circulation . The heart-lung machine serves to oxygenate the patient's blood and to send it into circulation in the place of the heart (which is about to be removed).
- Remove the cardiac ventricles and replace them with the total artificial heart . This is a very delicate operation that preserves the atria and ends with the union of afferent and efferent blood vessels to the new cardiac organ.
- Chest closure . It is the last stage of the intervention.
