The artificial vascular grafts currently in clinical use still have problems with respect to late calcification, restenosis, antithrombotic property, durability, biocompatibility, and safety, and no ideal artificial vascular graft has been developed to date. In view of this, we have been continuing basic experimental studies and their clinical applications in an attempt to develop tissue-engine...

Artificial oxygen carriers are not blood substitutes. They serve to carry oxygen to tissues and are either hemoglobin based or perfluorocarbon based. Driving the development of artificial oxygen carriers are concerns involving both the safety and quantity of the blood supply. No artificial oxygen carriers are currently approved for clinical use in the United States. Hemopure has been approved f...

The aim of this study was to determine a method for the numerical estimation of blood damage. Normally, human or animal blood is used for in vitro evaluation of lysis by artificial organs. However, blood has some disadvantages: large biological variability and different initial test conditions lead to nonreproducible test results. For that reason, it would be an advantage to have a numerical me...

The fluid mechanics of artificial blood pumps has been studied since the early 1970s in an attempt to understand and mitigate hemolysis and thrombus formation by the device. Pulsatile pumps are characterized by inlet jets that set up a rotational “washing” pattern during filling. Strong regurgitant jets through the closed artificial heart valves have Reynolds stresses on the order of 10,000 dyn...

Background Cardiovascular diseases are one of the main causes of mortality in many parts of the world, with atherosclerosis figuring as the principal cause of coronary occlusion, stroke and aortic aneurysm [1]. Saphenous vein is the most commonly used vascular prosthesis for small-caliber (< 6 mm) vascular grafts, however, 10%-40% of patients do not have a saphenous vein suitable for prosthetic...

Imaging-based blood flow measurement techniques, such as particle image velocimetry, have become an important tool in cardiovascular research. They provide quantitative information about blood flow, which benefits applications ranging from developmental biology to tumor perfusion studies. Studies using these methods can be classified based on whether they use artificial tracers or red blood cel...

Arterial blood samples were taken at hourly intervals for three hours from ten patients who were artificially ventilated in the immediate postoperative period following mitral valve replacement. Constant minute volume ventilation was used without periodic hyperinflation. Over the three-hour period the arterial blood oxygen tension rose slightly. It was concluded that constant volume ventilation...