The transplanted heart was beating rhythmically when patient Andrea Ybarra awoke from anesthesia after transplant surgery. In fact, it was beating even before the doctors transplanted it.

Ybarra belongs to a small group of people who have received a beating heart during a transplant surgery, an experimental operation which is carried out mainly in Europe. The donor heart is placed in a special box that feeds on blood and keeps the heart warm and active outside the body.

“I felt relaxed when I woke up. I was not scared,” recalled the 40-year-old woman suffering from lupus. “I felt as if the heart had been part of me all the time.”

Despite advances in heart transplants, organs transportation in the U.S. and many other partes of world remain on pretty low level: a chemical is injected into the donor’s heart to stop it and put in a simple cooler to preserve cold during transport to the location of the receiver.

Once the donor heart is removed, there is a race against time. A heart can be kept in the cooler between four and six hours before it begins to lose viability.

Because of this restriction, doctors can not go too far to pick up a donor heart, as for more time they spend removing and transplanting the heart, the more likely the patient will die or develop heart disease.

Heart transplant procedure has been done this way for more than four decades, since the completion of the first heart transplant in the U.S. on December 6, 1967, but what if the heart could continue pumping after removal from the body?

The new high-tech heart box  provides blood circulation through the heart and keeps heart beating while traveling from hospital to hospital.

After successful cases reported in Europe, the University of California at Los Angeles currently leads an experiment together with other schools of the safety and effectiveness of the new method of conservation in comparison with the usual cooler.

If the new technology can preserve the heart for longer time, it could revolutionize this field of medicine, experts say.