Monitoring of biological information with magnetic bearing in blood pump and its application for treatment

Abstract

One of the challenges of blood pumps that are being used for a long time is the synchronous control of flow rate with a natural heartbeat and the control of blood coagulation. To realize these control systems, it is usually necessary to use additional sensors in the blood pump system. This is, however, difficult in the case of implantable pumps due to the complexity and increasing size of the system. Hence, we have proposed a method in which a magnetic bearing is applied not only as a mechanism to support the impeller but also used as a sensor to measure biological information in real time, thereby achieving the heart rate synchronization control and the thrombosis detection and prevention in the blood pump. We conducted in vitro experiments with a mock circulatory loop to evaluate the proposed methods.