Design and Analysis of a Novel Bionic Cardiac Simulator

Cardiac simulator can solve the difficulties of cardiac surgeon training, minimally invasive devices lack of test methods and many other problems. But the current cardiac simulator cannot accurately simulate the real heart because of the incorrect blood circulation or uneven deformation and other reasons. An artificial muscle-driven biomimetic cardiac simulator is proposed in this paper. It is composed of heart chambers, bionic valves ， external circulation, drive mechanism and a control system. Heart chambers is designed basically on true cardiac 3D data and can realize a correct correspondence of ventricular pressure and systole/diastole movement. The bionic valves can achieve one-way flowing. The driving parameters are designed based on the ventricular end-diastolic pressure of healthy adults. Experiments show that in the heart rate of 40-90 rpm conditions, the stroke volume (SV) first increases and then decreases with the peak appearing at the heart rate of 60 bpm with 65ml, which is meet the adult heart beat physiological parameters. 7.6% and 1% backflows are detected for the mitral and tricuspid valves under the heart rate of 60 bpm, which illustrates the valves cannot be tightly closed and need further improvements. The phantom was also scanned with CT and all components can be clearly identified from the slice images obtained. The cardiac simulator can be used for cardiac medical imaging studies, new equipment testing and the basic training of doctors and many other aspects.