Output Flow Estimation of Pneumatically Controlled Ventricular Assist Device with the help of Artificial Neural Network

The paper presents a novel approach to the problem of reliable estimation of the output flow going out from pneumatically controlled ventricular assist device (VAD). Among many possibilities, the application of artificial neural network (ANN) has been decided leading to the promising results. The basic difficulty however is to perform the suitable sufficiently exact measurement on the pneumatic side of the assisting system, which allows to avoid the application of the e.g. ultrasound measuring transducers on the hydraulic side, and which makes possible an implementation of the automatic control algorithm in the future for the whole measurement process. It is important however to underline that from the physical properties point of view these two mentioned sides i.e. pneumatic and hydraulic are completely different. Therefore, due to several nonlinearities, application of ANN gives an acceptable solution.