In the past 5 years, the numbers of ventricular assist device (VAD) systems implanted worldwide have increased exponentially. Thus, since the introduction of the HeartMate II LVAD by Thoratec (Thoratec Inc., Pleasanton, CA, USA) over 10 000 of these pumps have been implanted. The HVAD manufactured by HeartWare (HeartWare Inc., Framingham, MA, USA) has also found widespread application in Europe...

In this paper, we discuss several control techniques for Ventricular Assist Devices (VADs) and describe a hierarchical control structure that can be used to regulate the operation of a turbo-hydrodynamic VAD. Early assist devices were pulsatile, and control usually focused on regulating flow, atrial and/or arterial pressures. In recent years, non-pulsatile turbo-hydronamic devices have been int...

The first clinical application of the first-generation pulsatile implantable left ventricular assist system (LVAS) was in the mid 1980 s as a bridge to transplantation and contributed to an advancement of this field from a clinical experiment to an established therapeutic option for treating advanced heart failure patients. However, there have been technological limitations that have surfaced a...

The implantation of a mechanical circulatory device for end-stage ventricular failure is a possible therapeutic approach in adult and pediatric cardiac surgery and cardiology. The aim of this article is to present mechanical circulatory assist devices used in infants and children with special emphasis on extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, Berlin Heart assist device, centrifugal pump and Medos...

Introduction It is well known that air entrainment sets the ultimate limit to coating speeds. It is also known that air entrainment can be postponed to higher line speeds by manipulating coating flows to generate what has been termed ‘hydrodynamic assist’ [1]. There is increasing evidence that the benefit is associated with geometric or hydrodynamic confinement of the moving contact line [1-3]....

This paper presents a novel rule-driven architecture modeling technique. Different from grammar based procedural modeling approaches, our proposed method, called rule assist architecture modeling (RAAM), tends to integrate user interactions with implied modeling rules. Construction rules, configure rules and constrain rules are introduced in our method to minimize user interactions and enhance ...

We propose a Novel Left Ventricular Assist System (Novel LVAS) as a bridge to cardiac transplantation and to functional heart recovery in advanced heart failure. This report regards the principles that led to its development. It is our hope that the design of a high-peak-output pump of smaller size will lead to improved functional capacity, when compared with currently available left ventricula...

The performance of a traditional cache memory hierarchy can be improved by utilizing mechanisms such as a victim cache or a stream bu er (cache assists). The amount of on{ chip memory for cache assist is typically limited for technological reasons. In addition, the cache assist size is limited in order to maintain a fast access time. Performance gains from using a stream bu er or a victim cache...

Abstract An upper limb motion assist robot to elderly and disabled people is proposed in this paper. The robot can be mounted on a wheelchair to actuate an elderly person’s upper limb three dimensionally by his will. A wrist of an arm is suspended, and actuated by a wire driven control system. A vibration reduction system is also developed to decrease the vibration occurred in the wire driven s...