Heart disease is Australia's biggest killer, but medical technology is now able to keep patients alive for longer by replacing the heart altogether.

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Synopsis | The Ultimate Bypass (2010)
It's a terrible irony. Heart disease is Australia's biggest killer, yet we have one of the lowest organ donation rates in the world. The wait for a transplant can be agonisingly long and often it's fatal. But there's been some remarkable progress in recent times; doctors can now keep their patients alive for months, even years, by hooking them up to artificial pumps. It's amazing stuff, and that's just the start of it. In the future, these machines will be so small that they'll actually replace the human heart.

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