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A heart valve opens and shuts with every beat, tens of millions of times a year. When disease damages one, surgeons may replace it with a mechanical valve. For years Indian surgeons had to import every one. M. S. Valiathan decided India should design and build its own. This post covers who he was, how a tilting disc valve works, how his team tested theirs, a worked calculation of how many times a valve must move, and what you can learn from his way of working.
Who was M. S. Valiathan?
An obituary in the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics by Sunil Pandya records that Marthanda Varma Sankaran Valiathan was born in 1934 in Mavelikara, in today's Alappuzha district of Kerala. He trained in surgery in Liverpool, gaining the fellowships of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons of Edinburgh and England in 1960, then trained in cardiac surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital and Georgetown University Hospital in the United States.
He returned to India in 1971 but could not find a post where he could do cardiac surgery or research. Then Kerala's Chief Minister, C. Achutha Menon, invited him to lead the new Sree Chitra medical centre in Thiruvananthapuram.
How did Sree Chitra start?
The institute's history page explains that the Travancore royal family gifted a building in 1973, and the medical centre opened in 1976. A Biomedical Technology Wing followed at the Satelmond Palace, about 11 km away. In 1980 an Act of Parliament made it an Institute of National Importance. Its list of former directors shows Valiathan as Director from 1 January 1979 to 31 May 1994.
The IJME obituary describes the problem he faced: cardiac surgeons in India depended entirely on foreign makers for very expensive valves. His team set out to design a mechanical valve of their own.
How does a tilting disc valve work?
A valve must let blood through in one direction and block it in the other. In a tilting disc design, a single disc sits in a ring. Blood pushing forward tips the disc open at an angle; when the pressure reverses, the disc swings shut. The NCERT Class 11 Biology chapter on Body Fluids and Circulation explains why one-way flow matters: the heart's own valves stop blood flowing backwards between chambers.
A good valve opens and closes quickly, lets little blood leak back, causes little resistance, and does not damage blood cells or trigger clots.
How did the team test their valve?
In a 1983 paper in the Bulletin of Materials Science, G. S. Bhuvaneshwar, A. V. Ramani and Valiathan described the valve then under development: a disc of a polyacetal plastic (Delrin), a titanium cage and a polyester sewing ring. They set out their goals, including that a valve "must be durable for a minimum period of 10 years".
They tested it against an imported valve of equal size, a No. 27 Björk-Shiley, in a pulse duplicator, a machine that copies the pumping of the left side of the heart, at flow rates from 2 to 8 litres a minute. The Chitra valve had marginally lower pressure drops and backflow, which they put down to its improved disc shape. The team kept testing occluder materials, including synthetic sapphire in a 1991 study.
The institute's technology transfer page lists the artificial heart valve, transferred to TTK Healthcare, among its commercial products, along with blood bags.
Worked example: how many times must a valve move?
The 1983 paper asks for at least 10 years of life. NCERT gives an average heart rate of 72 beats a minute.
Per day. 72 × 60 × 24 = 103,680 beats.
Per year. 103,680 × 365 = 37,843,200, about 38 million.
Over 10 years. 37,843,200 × 10 = 378,432,000, about 380 million openings and closings.
That is why valves are tested in machines that run far faster than a real heart: no lab can wait 10 years for an answer.
What mistakes do students make with heart valves?
Mixing up valve names. The tricuspid valve is between right atrium and right ventricle; the bicuspid or mitral valve on the left; semilunar valves at the exits of the ventricles.
Forgetting what the sounds mean. NCERT links the first heart sound to closure of the tricuspid and bicuspid valves and the second to closure of the semilunar valves.
Our post on body fluids and circulation covers the chapter, and John Gibbon and the heart-lung machine explains how surgeons got inside the heart at all. If the order of valves and chambers will not stick, the Fermi Concept Library covers every concept in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics and computing.
Later, the IJME obituary notes, Valiathan became the first Vice-Chancellor of Manipal University, wrote books on Ayurveda, and received the Padma Vibhushan in 2005. He died on 17 July 2024 in Manipal, aged 90.
What can a student learn from Valiathan's way of working?
Turn dependence into a project. Costly imports were a problem he chose to solve, not just accept.
Put doctors and engineers together. A surgeon led a team of engineers and materials scientists.
Test against the best you can get. Comparing with an established imported valve made the results meaningful.
Next step: work out how many times a valve moves in a year for a heart rate of 80 beats a minute.
