An artificial heart is a device that replaces the heart. Artificial hearts are typically used to bridge the time to heart transplantation, or to permanently replace the heart in the case that a heart transplant is impossible. Although other similar inventions preceded it from the late 1940s, the first artificial heart to be successfully implanted in a human was the Jarvik-7 in 1982, designed by a team including Willem Johan Kolff and Robert Jarvik.
Michael Ellis DeBakey was a Lebanese-American cardiac surgeon and vascular surgeon, scientist and medical educator who became the chancellor emeritus of Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, director of the Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center, and senior attending surgeon at Houston Methodist Hospital in Houston, with a career spanning 75 years.
Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) is a private stand-alone health sciences university located in Houston, Texas within the Texas Medical Center, the world's largest medical center. BCM is composed of four academic components: the School of Medicine, the Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences; the School of Health Professions, and the National School of Tropical Medicine. The school is part owner, alongside Catholic Health Initiatives (CHI), of Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center, the flagship hospital of the CHI St. Luke's Health system. Other affiliated teaching hospitals and research institutes include Harris Health System's Ben Taub Hospital, Texas Children's Hospital, The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, TIRR Memorial Hermann, the Menninger Clinic, the Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center, and the Children's Hospital of San Antonio.
Denton Arthur Cooley was an American heart and cardiothoracic surgeon famous for performing the first implantation of a total artificial heart. Cooley was also the founder and surgeon in-chief of The Texas Heart Institute, chief of Cardiovascular Surgery at clinical partner Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center, consultant in Cardiovascular Surgery at Texas Children's Hospital and a clinical professor of Surgery at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
Jonathan Drummond-Webb was a South African pediatric heart surgeon.
Michael E. DeBakey High School for Health Professions is a medical secondary school located in the Medical Center area of Houston, Texas, United States. It is a part of the Houston Independent School District.
A ventricular assist device (VAD) is an electromechanical device for assisting cardiac circulation, which is used either to partially or to completely replace the function of a failing heart. The function of VADs is different from that of artificial cardiac pacemakers; some are for short-term use, typically for patients recovering from myocardial infarction and for patients recovering from cardiac surgery; some are for long-term use, typically for patients suffering from advanced heart failure.
Houston Methodist Hospital is the flagship hospital of Houston Methodist. Located in the Texas Medical Center in Houston, Texas, Houston Methodist Hospital was established in 1919 during the height of the Spanish influenza epidemic as an outreach ministry of Methodist Episcopal Church. Houston Methodist comprises seven community hospitals, a continuing care hospital as well as several emergency centers and physical therapy clinics throughout greater Houston.
Dr. José Rafael Espada is a former Vice President of Guatemala and a former cardiothoracic surgeon.
Domingo Santo Liotta is a pioneer of heart surgery, creator of multiple cardiac prostheses including the first total artificial heart used in a human being.
O. H. "Bud" Frazier is a heart surgeon and director of cardiovascular surgery research at the Texas Heart Institute (THI), best known for his work in mechanical circulatory support (MCS) of failing hearts using left ventricular assist devices (LVAD) and total artificial hearts (TAH).
Adrian Kantrowitz was an American cardiac surgeon whose team performed the world's second heart transplant attempt at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York on December 6, 1967. The infant lived for only six hours. At a press conference afterwards, Kantrowitz emphasized that he considered the operation to have been a failure.
Minimally invasive cardiac surgery, also known as MICS CABG or the McGinn technique is heart surgery performed through several small incisions instead of the traditional open-heart surgery that requires a median sternotomy approach. MICS CABG is a beating-heart multi-vessel procedure performed under direct vision through an anterolateral mini-thoracotomy.
Norman Edward Shumway was a pioneer of heart surgery at Stanford University. He was the 67th president of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery and the first to perform an adult human to human heart transplantation in the United States.
Charles D Fraser, Jr. is the medical director and surgeon of the Texas Center for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Disease at Dell Children's Medical Center. Formerly, Fraser was chief of congenital heart surgery and cardiac surgeon-in-charge at Texas Children's Hospital, the nation's largest pediatric hospital, served as chief of the Congenital Heart Surgery Division at Baylor College of Medicine, and director of the Adult Congenital Heart Surgery Program at the Texas Heart Institute.
ReliantHeart, Inc. is a privately held American company headquartered in Houston, Texas that designs, manufactures, and provides remote monitoring capabilities for its left ventricular assist devices which are used to assist circulation for failing hearts.
Dallas W. Anderson is a businessman who founded MicroMed Technology Inc. in 1995, and in 1996 was granted exclusive rights to the NASA/DeBakey VAD.
Michael J. Reardon is an American cardiac surgeon and medical researcher. He is known for his work in heart autotransplantation for malignant heart tumors, an operation in which the surgeon removes the patient's heart, cuts out the malignant tumor, and reimplants the heart back in the patient's chest. He performed the first successful heart autotransplantation for a cancerous heart tumor in 1998.
William A. Zoghbi is a Lebanese-American cardiologist. He is Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and in the Houston Methodist Institute for Academic Medicine, in Houston Texas. He holds the Elkins Family Distinguished Chair in Cardiac Health at the Houston Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center. Zoghbi is the Chairman of the Department of Cardiology at Houston Methodist Hospital. He is a Master of the American College of Cardiology and served as its president in 2012.
