Energized by Circulation Research over 30 years.

Abstract

Congratulations on the 50th anniversary of Circulation Research in 2003. As a medical student of Okayama University in Japan in the early 1960s, I was very impressed by the well-designed cardiac pump function after watching and touching beating hearts in situ in canine open-chest experiments and learning about the heart in physiology classes. This definitely motivated me to learn more about cardiac function throughout my education. My dream in those days was to combine medicine and engineering as an extension of my electronics and mechanics hobbies since childhood days. I heard that the University of Tokyo had started the Institute for Medical Electronics and opened its PhD course for the first time in Japan. After getting an MD at Okayama University in 1966, I entered the PhD course of Applied Physiology and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Tokyo instead of taking a clinical internship. As a PhD student, I decided to investigate the attractive but still mysterious cardiac function and started to measure left ventricular pressure and volume in the in situ beating canine heart. For aortic flow measurement, the electromagnetic flowmeter had just been commercialized, but I built one from the parts I bought in radio shops, relying on my own electromechanic savvy. I even made aortic flow probes by making their coils and electrodes and putting them together with epoxy glue. Using the homemade electromagnetic flowmeter and a commercial manometer, I succeeded in measuring aortic flow and left ventricular pressure continuously for the first time in my career. This excited me greatly and tremendously energized me to go further along the line. In those days, world-renowned physiology and cardiology textbooks showed the Frank-Starling Law of the Heart and cardiac output curves, the Sarnoff ventricular function curves, and the Sonnenblick myocardial force-velocity curves as the standard measures of …