Ghost Heart

A ghost heart, or better yet, a decellularized heart!
This is the future of regenerative medicine. A giant step closer for millions in need of new organs.
This is an experimental "ghost heart" which has been decellularized.
Decellularization is a tissue engineering technique designed to strip out all the cells from a donor organ, leaving nothing but the connective tissue that used to hold the cells in place.
In other words, a technique which aims the substution of artificial scaffolds by decellularized organs.
This process is accomplished by circulating detergent-based solutions through the organ walls. Those solutions destroy and remove all the original living cells without affecting the extracellular matrix tissue which, in the end, results in an 'empty' matrix tissue.
This scaffold of connective tissue - called a "ghost organ" for its pale and almost translucent appearance - can then be reseeded with a patient's own cells, with the goal of regenerating an organ that can be transplanted into the patient without fear of tissue rejection.
Decellularized tissues have several advantages with respect to the man-made scaffolds since they reproduce much more accurately the structure of the extracellular matrix in which cells live in-vivo, and may even incorporate some of the chemical and mechanical signals which lead the cells to behave in a determined 'realistic' way.