Physiologic outcome of varying speed rotary blood pump support algorithms: a review study

Rotary blood pumps have the potential to become a viable long-term treatment option for the heart failure patients to bridge to transplantation or destination therapy. However, these devices operate at a constant speed which may lead to long term complications or they may operate in an undesired support mode such as excessive pumping in the patients' body. A possible solution to such physiological problems or using these devices as a destination therapy or maintaining the optimal support level according to changing conditions in the body is applying a varying speed rotary blood pump support. Over the years, different varying operating speed support algorithms have been proposed to alleviate the effect of the constant speed rotary blood pump support and improve the outcome of these devices. In this paper, it is aimed to compile and present proposed varying speed rotary blood pump support algorithms by classifying them according to the considered physiological problem in each study.