The human lung is a complex system of branching bronchial tubes, peeling alveoli and gas exchange membranes. No device created by human hands is capable of as efficiently enriching the blood with oxygen as natural surfactant does, but developments are uninterruptedly continued - this is a very promising market sector.
A person, whose lungs are not capable of performing respiratory function, is attached to ventilators and oxygen concentrators, a pump driving his blood through a gas exchanger, enriching it with the oxygen and removing the carbon dioxide. Of course, during this process a person is forced to maintain a bed rest.
For purpose to make the patients more mobile, the compact artificial lungs were developed. Their creation was spurred by the outbreak of swine flu in 2009, the primary symptom of which was the respiratory failure.
Mobile oxygen concentrators have been produced for a decade and have made life easier for people with respiratory failure. Such patients are no longer riveted to cumbersome devices and can travel to certain distances. Nevertheless, even mobile oxygen concentrators have the dimensions of a suitcase and weigh about 10 kilograms, so Pittsburgh University announced the development of a more compact oxygen support device "in a backpack."
The team of William Federspiel has developed the artificial lungs, which include a pump and gas exchanger. The "Lung" is connected through the tubes to the circulatory system, effectively enriching the blood with oxygen and removing carbon dioxide from it.
Successful tests on four experimental sheep were completed in the spring of 2017. During the experiment, the time of continuous operation of the instrument, with the help of external cylinders and oxygen concentrators, reached six hours. Reducing the number of handsets was one of the main tasks of the developers.
An alternative model was developed at the University of Carnegie Mellon - for patients with a heart that is able to pump the blood through an external artificial organ. The device is connected to the cardiac shunt and is attached to the body with the straps. There is no pump, whose role is given to the heart, and there is only a gas exchanger. Blood to the apparatus is supplied directly from the arteries.
While both devices need an external source of oxygen, the process of creating a built-in oxygen concentrator that will work with external air is proceeding successfully. The prototype is now tested on rats and demonstrates the impressive results due to the use of ultra-thin (up to 20 micrometers) polymer tubes.
Artificial lungs can help the patients recover from a number of pulmonary infections, and, most importantly, comfortably wait for the donor lungs, the queue for which is stretched for years
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