Although implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) have been around for nearly 20 years, they gained notoriety in 2001 when Vice President Dick Cheney became a high-profile patient who underwent the implantation procedure.

As a professor of surgery and the director of a mitral valve clinic that performs 300 to 400 valve repairs each year (the average for most clinics is 10), all while planning a major departmental move, it’s a wonder how Steven Bolling, M.D., has time to sleep at night.
Yet amidst seminars, surgeries and moving boxes he was able to co-invent a groundbreaking device that treats mitral valve leakage, improving the left ventricle and helping congestive heart failure patients regain lost heart function.

It's almost like taking a stab in the dark, but ablating one or more arrythmias within the human heart is a moment when accuracy is everything and error is irreversible. Which is why visualization during cardiac ablation is one of the greatest challenges for the electrophysiologist performing the procedure.

It’s not uncommon for a cardiologist at University Community Hospital (UCH) in Tampa to walk about two miles to get his job done — that’s not walking to work, but walking at work. But these doctors — now burning valuable time and energy to find and view images and patient data from one lab and department to another — are about to take a quantum leap into 21st-century efficiency as the hospital prepares to open its new, free-standing, all-digital Pepin Heart Hospital and Patel Research Institute.


Beginning April 1, Terumo officially launches its own, full-scale marketing and sales program for all its products in the U.S. — including the flagship Glidewire catheter line — which have formerly been sold under the Boston Scientific name. Diagnostic & Invasive Cardiology wanted to know how this change will impact cardiologists and all peripheral interventionalists, and what else Terumo is doing to make doctors’ jobs a little easier.


The drug-eluting stent (DES) market is a multibillion dollar business in the U.S. — and it's estimated that over three million people have received DES worldwide since their approval, representing over 4.5 million DES implantations.
Today, there are two DES devices on the market: Cypher by Cordis, a Johnson & Johnson company, and Taxus by Boston Scientific. These devices have revolutionized the way people live with coronary artery disease.


What factors are driving increased adoption of healthcare information technology, otherwise known as HIT?
Clinical IT and technology in general are getting a lot of focus from the government, from the industry, from clinicians — and the drive to make healthcare safer is what's driving overall growth of clinical IT and technology adoption.

An asymptomatic 75-year-old woman with a history of coronary artery disease, angioplasty, coronary artery bypass grafting, hypertension and hyperlipidemia was referred for 64-slice cardiovascular computed tomography (CVCT) three months post bypass. A Persantine myocardial perfusion study had been conducted one week prior to CVCT to assess graft patency.


Coronary bypass surgery, a difficult and painful way to repair major damage caused by coronary artery disease, may be on its way out — and it’s a long time coming for researchers like Douglas Losordo, M.D. After all, he’s spent the past 10 years looking into the possibilities of adult stem cell therapy as a viable alternative to the procedure.

Novelists and playwrights might call it a cruel irony —  heroes who succumb to the powers of evil, true love tragically divided or a good deed that results in suffering. A similarly unjust twist of fate occurs in the cardiologist’s world when, perhaps a day or two following a successful percutaneous intervention (PCI), the patient is afflicted with contrast-induced nephropathy (CIN), a rare adverse event in patients with healthy kidneys, but a potentially fatal outcome with an incidence rate of at least 16 percent among certain high-risk patients.
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