1. Slepian M, Alemu Y, Silva J, Smith R, Einav S, Bluestein D. 2013. The Syncardia™ total artificial heart: in
vivo, in vitro, and computational modeling studies. Journal of Biomechanics 46(2):266-275.
The SynCardia total artificial heart (TAH) is the only artificial heart approved by the FDA. This TAH is
pneumatically driven, which means that has air pumps. The SynCardia is used for bridge to
transplantation (BTT) in patients at imminent risk of death. Over 1,100 TAH has been successfully
implanted to date. TAH has proven great efficiency treating patients with acute irreversible heart failure.
The future goal of the engineers that designed the TAH is to develop a pediatric TAH, which will be used
for the treatment of children and small adults, that will be smaller but that works better than the normal
TAH. There are two of TAH, the AbioCor and the SynCardia. The AbioCor has not been adopted by the
clinical community, while the SynCardia has passed all the clinical trials. The author explains and
summarizes the active ongoing investigations examining the thrombo-reactivity, flow characteristics and
partial modeling of the TAH including: (a) assessment of the degree of platelet reactivity induced by the
present clinical 70 cc TAH via a closed loop platelet activity state assay, (b) modeling of the motion of
the pulsatile mobile diaphragm, and (c) fluid-structure interactions and assessment of the flow behavior
through inflow and outflow regions of the TAH fitted with modern bi-leaflet heart valves.