1960 Albers, an American graduate student, unfortunately suffered from severe kidney disease, and his kidney could not complete the task of filtering harmful substances in the blood. If measures are not taken in time, uremia will occur, that is, he will have a series of symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, edema, high blood pressure, coma and so on, until his kidney fails completely and he dies. At this time, the doctors decisively gave him "artificial hemodialysis", that is, "artificial kidney" treatment, giving him a second life. During the treatment, Albers studied and worked tenaciously with the help of "artificial kidney" and finally finished his doctoral thesis. Nowadays, as many as 300,000 to 400,000 people in the world rely on artificial hemodialysis to replace kidney function and keep working. Artificial kidney has made great contributions to mankind.

Patients with kidney disease are using artificial kidney machines to filter waste in blood.

So, how to carry out "artificial hemodialysis"? Perhaps we can vividly compare it to "artificial blood washing". It turns out that in patients with severe kidney disease, because the kidneys can't filter toxins and metabolites in the blood, these substances will accumulate in the blood, which will eventually lead to serious poisoning symptoms. Artificial hemodialysis is to use the principle of "dialysis" to filter these wastes out of the blood. Scientists have designed a hemodialysis machine, which is mainly composed of a dialyzer and a power pump. The former is composed of extremely fine hollow translucent tubules that invade dialysate. Therefore, when the patient's blood flows through the tubule, the metabolic wastes such as urea in the blood can be discharged into the dialysate through dialysis, and some substances beneficial to the body in the dialysate, such as potassium, calcium and glucose, can also be ingested into the blood. As for the power pump, it is the power device that pushes the patient's blood into the dialyzer.

At present, many scientists in the world are committed to the improvement and manufacture of artificial kidney. 1985 osaka city university medical research center has successfully developed a new type of artificial kidney, which is driven by the patient's own blood pressure instead of a power pump. This is not only simpler, but also safer. Animal experiments show that its function is basically similar to that of real human kidney, and it has a good curative effect on patients. In recent years, scientists are trying to realize the miniaturization and high efficiency of artificial kidney. China has also successfully developed "adsorption artificial kidney" and "viscose hollow fiber artificial kidney", and the clinical effect is also quite good.