A fast building and effective hydraulic pediatric mock circulatory system for the evaluation of a left ventricular assist device.

A mock circulatory system (MCS) has been proven a useful tool in the development of a ventricular assist device. Nowadays a MCS aimed at the evaluation of pediatric blood pumps, which require many different considerations compared with that of adults, has become an urgent need. This article presents the details on how the dynamic process of the left ventricle, which is described in terms of the pressure-volume loop (P-V loop), and the properties of the circulation such as compliance and resistance are simulated by hydraulic elements. A simple control method is introduced to reproduce the physiological afterload and preload sensitivities of the mock ventricle for the first time. Hemodynamic performance of the system is obtained by medical sensors to validate the similarity of the device to the native cardiovascular system. The actual sensitivities of the mock ventricle are obtained intuitively from the changes of the P-V loops. The aortic input impedance of the MCS is also obtained and compared with the data from previous medical reports. At last a pediatric left ventricular assist device (LVAD) prototype is introduced for testing to further verify the effectiveness of the MCS. The experimental results indicate that this pediatric MCS is capable of reproducing basic hemodynamic characteristics of a child in both normal and pathological conditions and it is sufficient for testing a pediatric LVAD. Besides, most components constituting the main hydraulic part of this MCS are inexpensive off-the-shelf products, making the MCS easy and fast to build.