Fixing your heart with light

Last year, cardiologists at Boston Children’s Hospital reported developing a groundbreaking adhesive patch for sealing holes in the heart. The patch guides the heart’s own tissue to grow over it, forming an organic bridge. Once the hole is sealed, the biodegradable patch dissolves, leaving no foreign material in the body. As revolutionary as this device was, it still had one major drawback: implanting the patch required highly invasive open-heart surgery. But that may be about to change. Researchers from the Wyss Institute, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Boston Children’s have jointly designed a radically different way to implant the patch without having to stop the heart, place patients on bypass or cut open their chests. They created a flexible, UV light-guided catheter that can be inserted through a vein in the rib cage, and from there directed to the defect within the beating heart. Two positioning balloons, one on either side of the hole, open when the catheter is fully in place. One of the balloon’s surfaces has a mirror-reflecting quality that reveals areas of the heart that would otherwise be difficult to see without more invasive tactics. After releasing the patch, the surgeon turns on the catheter’s UV light, which activates the patch’s adhesive coating. The two balloons are then deflated and withdrawn. The new catheter/patch combo has been successfully used to cl...
Source: Mass Device - Category: Medical Equipment Authors: Tags: Blog Vector Blog Source Type: news