Abstract
Circulatory support with an artificial heart provides a valuable supplement in the field of heart transplantation. An artificial heart can be implanted before a suitable donor organ is available, or after heart transplantation if unmanageable acute graft rejection or insufficiency develops. The so-called bridge procedure, i.e., artificial heart support followed by heart transplantation, was introduced by Cooley in 1969 with the use of the Liotta total artificial heart (TAH) [1]. Thirteen years later, the Jarvik-7 (Symbion, Salt Lake City, UT, USA) TAH was permanently implanted in a human for the first time by DeVries et al. [2]. Although initially all of the TAH recipients died of multiple complications, close examination of the results provided many cautionary lessons for the clinical use of artificial hearts. The first successful bridging was performed in 1984 by Starnes et al. [3], who used an implantable Novacor (Baxter Healthcare, Novacor Division, Oakland, CA, USA) left ventricular assist device (LVAD), followed by Hill et al. [4] with a Pierce-Donachy LVAD, and in 1985 by Copeland et al. [5] with a Jarvik-7 TAH. During the ensuing decade, the bridge-to-transplantation procedure spread all over the world with increasing success.