Pulsatile flow pump based on an iterative controlled piston pump actuator as an in-vitro cardiovascular flow model

In-vitro cardiovascular experiments provide an effective means for characterizing structural or hemodynamic features of medical devices before they are tested on animals or used in clinical practice. In-vitro experiments simulate complicated cardiovascular systems with blood pumps, vessels and valves, but without human or animal subjects. Therefore, such experiments are free from ethical issues and present large cost savings in comparison to in-vivo experiments. In this study, we aimed to design a fully programmable pulsatile flow pump that can consistently and accurately reproduce a wide range of physiological flow waveforms without costly transient flowmeter in the system. An iterative control algorithm (ICA) was used to minimize the differences between the desired and produced flow waveforms. Our results confirm that the developed pulsatile pump can replicate flow waveforms accurately, with root mean square errors (RMSEs) of 0.64 L/min and 0.52 mL for the flow rate and stroke volume, respectively.