What is Preload

In the last decades cardiovascular diseases greatly increased worldwide, and bioengineering provided new technologies and cardiovascular prostheses to medical doctors and surgeons. The design of active and passive devices aroused notable interests becoming more and more challenging as well as crucial. In this framework, it is important to faithfully reproduce the interaction between the prostheses and the cardiovascular system when in-vitro experiments are performed. For this reason, a new and improved kind of test benches becomes necessary. Purely hydraulic mock circulatory systems showed low flexibility to allow tests of different cardiovascular devices and low precision when a reference mathematical model must be reproduced. In this chapter a new bench is described. It combines the computer model of the cardiovascular system and its real-time interaction with the device to be tested. The solution adopted can be exploited in a Grid environment to allow remote experimentation.