ARDUINO-BASED ORGAN PERFUSION SYSTEM

Laboratory equipment could be expensive and their cost can be unsustainable for scientists with limited financial resources. In order to overcome these impediments and to improve our experimental studies on liver resection in rats, a multipurpose organ perfusion system was projected and realized using low-cost components. The device is based on Arduino boards, an easy-to-use and open-source microcontroller, that receives digital and analog inputs, can produce digital outputs and it is programmable in C++. Our perfusion system is composed of: 1) the main control unit that receives pressure data from two independent pressure transducers commonly used in the OR, it receives input from two potentiometers, seven switches, and a push-button; it can display data with an LCD and it can control the speed and the direction of two independent peristaltic-pump, 2) a motor unit composed by peristaltic pumps controlled by two stepper motors, 3) a thermostatic unit that received data from temperature probe and can control up to three heating units. The pulsating flow generated by the peristaltic pump can be flattened by a dampener unit to simulate the portal flow, and the interposition of a hollow-fiber micro-oxygenator can increase the pO2 of the perfusion fluid in the arterial line. This cheap system is designed to measure the compliance of regenerating rat liver at increasing and decreasing portal and arterial flow during normothermic ex-vivo perfusion. However the system can be easily rearranged to perform different kinds of organ perfusion: subnormothermic o hypothermic ex-vivo preservation tests can be done by adding a Peltier-based cooling module. Indeed the main control unit can be programmed to control the flow rate based on pressure data to realize peritoneal perfusion or isolated limb perfusion.