The injunction against sales of Medtronic's transcatheter heart valves in Germany — issued in a July 12, 2013, court ruling — has gone into effect, according to Edwards Lifesciences Corp. The District Court of Mannheim ruled that Medtronic is infringing Edwards' Spenser patent for transcatheter heart valve technology and issued an injunction prohibiting the sale of CoreValve and CoreValve Evolut systems in Germany, and ordered a recall of these products. Edwards has now provided the bond required to initiate the injunction.

 Heart Imaging Technologies released the WebPAX cardiac echo reporting module.

Oklahoma State University Medical Center, located in Tulsa, Oklahoma, provides high-quality health services to rural and urban Oklahoma. The medical center has a partnership with Oklahoma State University Center for Health Sciences, providing a training ground for healthcare professionals across the region.


Diagnostic imaging is generally considered safe and noninvasive, so it is extremely unusual for a patient to die from injuries received from a scanner. However, this was the case in early June when a patient was killed because a portion of a SPECT/CT scanner fell during the scan at the James J. Peters VA Medical Center in the Bronx, N.Y. 

Vascular closure devices have a definite niche in areas where they were not originally intended but have found frequent off-label use because of their utility.

Vascular closure devices (VCD) were first introduced in the early 1990s with a goal to achieve quick hemostasis, thus reducing patients’ stay in the hospital (shorter time to ambulation) as well as faster turnover times for cardiac catheterization laboratories. 

The use of 3-D echo can help improve the accuracy and reproducibility of cardiac quantification. The technology has the advantage of removing the inter-operator variability by imaging whole volume datasets of the heart, so specific images or organ views can be extracted and reconstructed in any position, similar to CT or MRI datasets. Also, because a volumetric dataset is captured, exam times can be shortened, instead of spending time trying to get just the right angle for a 2-D slice view. Cardiac quantification can also be improved by measuring the entire heart or ventricle, rather than just slices of it. New software also automates this quantification.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Circulatory System Devices Panel of the Medical Devices Advisory Committee will review two new technologies to help treat heart failure (HF) Oct. 8-9, 2013.

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