As part of our series celebrating mentorship in medicine, we are highlighting the incredible contributions Dr. George Pantalos has made in biomedical engineering and beyond.
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It was the launch of Sputnik that cemented Dr. George Pantalos’ interest in space exploration. His father, a member of the Air Corps during World War II, could pick up the satellite on shortwave radio as it passed over their home in Columbus, Ohio.
“I was fascinated by the idea of flying and exploring space,” Dr. Pantalos, Professor, Dept of Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery, University of Louisville School of Medicine, explained. “Then as I grew older, I built and flew model rockets, and I figured that getting
a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering was my ticket to Mars.”
But it was a chance assignment for the school newspaper that modified his career trajectory toward biomedical engineering. An honors biology class at his high school was studying organ transplantation and had attempted a heart transplant on a bullfrog. Their first experiment failed, but for the second, they asked Dr. Pantalos, a photographer for the school newspaper and yearbook, to help them document their efforts through photos.
“I was able to go to class for the next several weeks before the next attempted transplant,” he said. “It became obvious to me that several of the problems they had, like how do you connect small blood vessels like the donor aorta to the recipient aorta? How do you keep slimy frogs from slipping off the operating room table? They all had engineering solutions. That got me turned on to the idea of using engineering to address medical challenges.”
With his career path defined, Dr. Pantalos attended Ohio State University where he studied aerospace engineering and premed. At that time, there wasn’t a developed biomedical engineering curriculum. After completing his graduate and postgraduate studies, Dr. Pantalos joined the University of Utah’s artificial heart program where he was introduced to Transonic Flowsensors that provide highly accurate measurements of volume flow through the mock tubing systems.
Throughout his career, Dr. Pantalos has developed and worked with physical simulations of the circulatory system devising in-vitro mock circulatory loops (MCL), a mechanical simulation of a physiological environment that mimics the human cardiovascular system. His 2004 landmark ASAIO publication “Characterization of an Adult Mock Circulation for Testing Cardiac Support Devices” has served as a boilerplate for the development of other MCLs. With his MCL, Dr. Pantalos measured aortic pressure, left ventricular pressure, aortic flow and left ventricular volume in normal, failure, and cardiac recovery test conditions.
Dr. Pantalos recalls, “I and my project team put together one of the circulation simulators that actually were used twice on the Space Shuttle.”
Transonic in Space
Transonic Flowsensors have made the journey into space several times to assist with Dr. Pantalos’ research. His University of Louisville team continues to work on an Astro Surgery project that would allow astronauts to perform surgery and resuscitation on expeditionary space flights. Their focus is fluid management, surgical tool design, technique, and proper training for astronauts. To measure fluid flow, Transonic clamp-on Flowsensors are consistently used during surgical experiments on zero-G airplane flights to ensure that there are adequate flow rates.
One time when the team encountered a problem during a Space Shuttle experiment, the Transonic team was there to lend a hand.
“We encountered a problem that we hadn't previously encountered during all our testing. For some reason, there was an interference from other electronics in the experiment with the electronics on the flow board and we kept losing our flow signal.”
Dr. Pantalos picked up the phone on a Sunday afternoon and called Transonic founder Cor Drost.
“He connected us with some of the other engineers. They came up with a solution to work around the problem of the flow signal getting turned off so that we could always count on having a flow signal."
Throughout his pioneering career as a cardiovascular explorer both here on Earth and in space, George Pantalos, Ph.D. has championed the value of knowing flow and has relied on Transonic Flowsensors to provide him with invaluable cardiovascular flow data. It’s been a rewarding collaboration for both parties.
