“Hemicardioplasty” isn’t a standard medical term… is it? Sometimes medicine advances faster than the English language that we use to describe it.

The first heart valve replacement surgery was performed more than 70 years ago, and since then, it’s become a workhorse procedure with countless successes logged.

Countless successes for adults, that is.

Babies are a different matter. Rather than a once-and-done surgical action taken to right an adult’s leaking valve, the same procedure for a baby merely sets them up for serial surgeries in the years to come. Xenografts (such as the ultra-precise Ozaki procedure) contain no living cells and therefor can’t grow with the patient. Autografts (such as the famed Ross procedure) create durability compromises by swapping valves into positions for which they were not designed. And as with any surgery, the risks to the patient increase exponentially with each reoperation.

Enter the partial heart replacement. Partial organ replacement has been around for many years in the form of split liver and lung lobe transplants. But comparing a split liver to a partial heart is analogous to restacking a simple block wall vs Frankensteining two Swiss watches together and then getting the device to keep perfect time.

Nevertheless, according to a recent article in JAMA, the initial short-term results from partial heart transplants in piglets and infant humans are excellent. The advantages are indisputable: because a partial heart transplant consists of living tissue, so the valve it contains can grow with the baby, preempting future transplants. Furthermore, partial hearts can utilize organs that would not be viable for complete transplants, such as hearts with ventricular dysfunction.

And since this is a Transonic blog, you’ll never guess whose technology could come in handy during such a cutting-edge procedure.

Partial heart transplant necessitates cutting and restitching the most essential vessels in the body, and this procedure can only prevent reoperation if the grafts are patent. Our probes return fast, accurate volume flow inside vessels, assuring patency, while leaving the vessels in their native state. Performing a partial heart without Transonic technology would be the same as building a racecar, then not even bothering to see if it will start before towing it to the track.

We congratulate everyone involved in developing and promoting this procedure, and we look forward to the day when reoperations are a thing of the past.

In the meantime, we’re doing everything we can to hasten that day.

Check out our products here to see what they can do for you and your patients. And we highly recommend the original article in JAMA, listed below.

Thanks for reading,

               Transonic Systems, Inc

                              The Measure of Better Results

Reference:

Rajab Taufiek, et al. “Partial Heart Transplant in Congenital Heart Surgery.” JAMA Online, July 17, 2024. Accessed on jamanetwork.com July 18, 2024.