How does the heart beat in the box?

- We take a heart, put it in a device, connect it to various tubes and start it up. This heart has its own circulation in the coronary vessels and, suspended in this box, starts to beat. This causes a sensation," says Dr. Zygmunt Kalicinski, a cardiac surgeon and clinical transplantologist from the Department of Heart, Thoracic and Transplant Surgery at UCK WUM. That's the simple way he talks about the technology, which not only makes it possible to extend the time from heart retrieval to implantation in the recipient by as much as three times, but also makes it possible to obtain organs from donors who would be rejected out of hand in a standard procedure.