Heart Valve Prostheses

Abstract

Heart valve prostheses have been successfully implanted in humans with diseased native heart valves for >40 years. Patients with implanted prostheses lead a relatively normal life. The currently available prostheses can be broadly classified into mechanical and biological heart valve prostheses. Mechanical valve prostheses are made entirely out of blood compatible nonbiological material, and hence are highly durable. However, thrombo‐embolic complications are still the major problem with these valves, and hence the patient has to be under long‐term anticoagulant therapy. Biological valves with leaflets made of biological tissue generally do not require long‐term anticoagulant therapy. However, they lack in durability with replacements becoming necessary at 10–12 years after implantation on the average. It is clear that further improvements are needed in the valve designs in order to improve the quality of life for patients implanted with valve prostheses. This article discusses the history of development of valve prostheses, mechanical and bioprosthetic valves currently available for implantation, and efforts in our understanding of the relationship between the dynamics of valve function and the problems existing with the current valve prostheses.

A Newly Developed Polyurethane Prosthetic Heart Valve

“…This study has performed a fluid dynamics analysis on the valve with optimal design parameters at the moment when the valve fully opened, i.e. at 0.08s, and calculated the EOA to compare with some existing products such as caged ball, titling disk, bileaflet, porcine and pericardial valves which referred to data provided by the work of Chandran et al [2]. It can be seen from the Table 3 that current PU valve shows a highly promising performance although there are still many drawbacks need to be improved to compare with existing products.…”