Engineering a Heartbeat: U of A and UAMS Team Wins BioVentures Medical Device of the Year

In an operating room at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock, Beau "Rocky" Aguilar stands at a table of surgeons and medical students holding an Xbox controller.

Aguilar, a doctoral student in mechanical engineering at the U of A, reprogrammed the controller to run a pumping system he built in Fayetteville. On the echocardiogram, heart valves open and close. On the table, a heart beats.

"Seeing the valves open and close was absolutely remarkable," Aguilar said. "The doctors were just so happy. It produced unrivaled fidelity."

This simulator could make heart surgery safer as surgical trainees prepare under more realistic conditions before working on a live patient.

Mechanical engineers at the U of A and clinicians at UAMS jointly developed this high-fidelity perfused cadaveric simulator. It was named the 2026 BioVentures Medical Device of the Year at BioVentures Innovation Day in Little Rock in August.

The award recognizes innovations with the potential to improve patient care, and this device aims to do it before a surgeon ever touches a patient.

By giving donated bodies lifelike circulation, it lets surgical teams practice two of medicine's highest-stakes procedures on anatomy that behaves like the real thing: bypass surgery, in which blood is rerouted around a blocked artery of the heart; and placing patients on heart-lung life support, known as ECMO.

"You're taking what is already a high-risk procedure and asking someone to interact with it for the first time on a live patient," said Anthony Gunderman, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, whose lab built the system.

"How do you de-risk it? How do you take that risk away from a patient whose life is on the line and move it to a safer, low-risk environment?"

Medicine and Mechanics

The project began with a phone call from Little Rock. In late 2025, a UAMS faculty member and Alex Gilman, M.D., a surgical resident at UAMS, had an idea to improve how surgeons train for open-heart procedures and reached out to the College of Engineering to find engineers to build it.

Gunderman signed on, and the collaboration, which includes UAMS interventional cardiologist Michael Luna, M.D., as the principal investigator, has run four studies at UAMS since November 2025.

The work demanded early mornings and long days. The pumping system is too large to ship, so on study days, Gunderman and Aguilar loaded it up and left Fayetteville at 4:30 a.m. to run the study in Little Rock, then drove back to Fayetteville around 8:30 p.m. that night.

'Two Different Languages'

It has also meant learning to talk to each other. Doctors and engineers use their own jargon.

"We speak two very different and unique languages," Aguilar said. "It's bridging that gap: this is what the body does, and this is how it is mirrored through our technology."

The teaching ran in both directions.

"Rocky has been incredible. He gave me a much-needed hour-long anatomy lesson on the heart before our first study so that I could help him design the pumping system. Then, when we went down to Little Rock for our first study, Rocky and our collaborators both gave me another lesson again with real anatomy," Gunderman said. "Rocky and I both taught them on the engineering side, and they all taught me on the anatomy side."

"We're not reanimating cadavers from a physiological standpoint," Gilman said. "For cardiovascular cases, having an aorta that is hydrodynamic and moves simulated blood, you get 100% realistic touch on the tissue. It's not like something that is embalmed and flat. It gives the utmost reality and similarity to a patient that you would operate on.

"There's an opportunity for future cardiovascular surgeons and people doing ECMO [extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, a form of life support that oxygenates the blood] to use this model," Gilman added. "It's something that can bridge the gap between someone performing surgery and using near-physiological conditions to improve your skills."

Recruited for Research

Aguilar's path to the project was its own unlikely story. He didn't seek out the U of A. He was recruited.

He was working at a California medical device startup and applying to doctoral programs elsewhere when the university spotted his application, saw the match with Gunderman's incoming lab and reached out directly.

"It fell into my lap," he said of the fully funded doctoral degree. Within his first year as a doctoral student, he was building the system that would win this award.

"I had no idea we even had an award coming. The focus is on improving medical training. It came as a surprise and reaffirmed that our device was moving the community forward."

The U of A team is continuing its studies and working toward peer-reviewed publications, an important metric for student success. "Ultimately, we hope students learn a lot from the process of communicating with stakeholders, building systems that meet stakeholder needs and writing about the outcomes," Gunderman said.

Ask anyone in the lab how they feel about the award, and Gunderman admits: "We're all pumped about it."

About the College of Engineering: The University of Arkansas College of Engineering is the state's largest engineering school, enrolling 4,701 students, including 3,608 undergraduate students and 1,093 graduate students. The college has more than 150 faculty and researchers and nearly 200 staff. The college ranked 65th among public institutions in the 2026 U.S. News & World Report Best Graduate Engineering Schools rankings and had $66.6 million in new research awards in fiscal year 2026. Its strategic plan, Vision 2035, will dramatically increase the state's engineering graduates by 2035, an outcome that will add $3.9 billion annually to Arkansas' economy.

About UAMS: UAMS is the state's only health sciences university, with colleges of Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Health Professions and Public Health; a graduate school; a hospital; a main campus in Little Rock; a Northwest Arkansas regional campus in Fayetteville; a statewide network of regional campuses; and seven institutes: the Winthrop P. Rockefeller Cancer Institute, Jackson T. Stephens Spine & Neurosciences Institute, Harvey & Bernice Jones Eye Institute, Psychiatric Research Institute, Donald W. Reynolds Institute on Aging, Translational Research Institute, and the Institute for Community Health Innovation. UAMS includes UAMS Health, a statewide health system that encompasses all of UAMS' clinical enterprise. UAMS is the only adult Level 1 trauma center in the state. UAMS has 3,553 students and 1,030 medical residents and fellows, and two dental residents. It is the state's largest public employer with about 12,000 employees, including 1,200 physicians who provide care to patients at UAMS, its regional campuses, Arkansas Children's, the VA Medical Center and Baptist Health. Visit www.uams.edu or www.uamshealth.com. Find us on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube or Instagram.