Consciously breathe in and out one time. This is exactly what you unconsciously do about 20,000 times a day to supply your body with oxygen. In some cases, however, various illnesses and diseases can interfere with the pulmonary gas exchange in the lungs and thus become a life-threatening problem. If medical treatment, drug therapy, and artificial respiration cannot help, artificial lungs can be used as an intensive care treatment.
The development of such artificial lungs into a realistic organ replacement is a dedicated research focus of Dr.-Ing. Jutta Arens, Professor and Chair of Engineering Organ Support Technologies at the UT.