Drs. Billy Cohn and Bud Frazier at the Texas Heart Institute were faced with a patient last March who’s heart was about to succumb to the point that even a left ventricular assist device wouldn’t be sufficient to keep him alive. Described as a story of “two visionary doctors from the Texas Heart Institute who in March of 2011 successfully replaced a dying man’s heart with a ‘continuous flow’ rotor-driven device of their own design, proving that life was possible without a pulse or a heartbeat,” the film was directed by Jeremiah Zagar, whose feature-length documentary “In A Dream” was nominated for two Emmy’s in 2010.
More from the Texas Heart Institute: Successful Implantation of a Continuous-Flow Total Artificial Heart in a Patient at The Texas Heart Institute
Product page of the devices used in the procedure: The HeartMate II from Thoratec Corporation