BROOKLYN (AP) Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz, a cardiac surgeon who performed the first human heart transplant in the United States and who also developed lifesaving medical implants, has died. He was 90.

Kantrowitz, who worked in the 1950s and ’60s at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, died Friday in Ann Arbor of complications from heart failure, said his wife, Jean Kantrowitz.

In 1967, Kantrowitz performed a human heart transplant three days after the world's first was performed in South Africa.

But the transplant, on an infant who died several hours later, was only a small part of his life's work to solve the problem of heart failure, his wife said.

Adrian Kantrowitz invented and for decades continued to improve the left ventricular assist device, or LVAD, which would later lend its name to his Detroit-based research company, L-VAD Technology Inc. The device is designed to be permanently implanted in patients with otherwise-terminal heart failure, helping their hearts circulate blood and allowing them to leave the hospital.

Kantrowitz also invented other lifesaving cardiac devices, including the intra-aortic balloon pump. He never retired, and "he never lost his mental alertness," said Jean Kantrowitz. He was an avid pilot, motorcyclist and sailor.

After serving in the Army Medical Corps during World War II, Kantrowitz entered the emerging field of cardiac surgery.

“Although Dr. Kantrowitz had the dedication and perseverance to accomplish this remarkable surgical tour de force, it was the notion that, for the first time, science could view the heart as yet another organ that could be fixed that was a revolutionary concept,� Dr. Stephen J. Lahey, director of cardiothoracic surgery at Maimonides Medical Center, said in a statement on the 40th anniversary of Dr. Kantrowitz’s transplant.

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