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St. Mark's Hospital has a new tool to help evaluate the electrical system of the heart and treat patients with cardiac arrhythmias, and it's all done by remote.
It kind of resembles video-game technology, but it's very real to doctors who say the system will improve their ability to get into difficult areas of the heart.
"It essentially adds a tool to our toolbox to allow for us to better deal with very complicated patients," said Dr. Scott Wall, cardiac electrophysiologist at St. Mark's Hospital.
The machine is a magnetic navigation system used to guide in catheters to patients with abnormal heart rhythms. Previously when doctors needed to get into the heart, they had to manually maneuver a stiff catheter into the organ.
"There's always a very small risk of those catheters perforating the wall of the heart while they're being manipulated," Wall said.
But with two magnets mounted on either side of the patient, the new system makes it a lot easier. "We rely on the magnetic field to basically pull those catheters into various spots," Wall explained.
The doctor, looking at 3-D images of the heart, is still the one who controls where the catheter goes, but now it's all automated. "I'm sitting in the control room at the back of the electrophysiology lab with a joystick, essentially, that I'm using to direct the catheter to very specific spots," Wall explained.
Doctors say the catheters with this equipment are softer, and the magnets are so strong the catheters go right in without any chance of tearing the heart, making it easier to access tighter spots. "We're adding one more component to the technologies we use to tackle these complicated problems," Wall said.
Once doctors get the catheter in the right place, small electrodes on the ends record the impulses of the heart, and doctors can basically "disconnect" that abnormal electrical pattern.
Dr. Wall told us physicians at St. Mark's will probably do several hundred surgeries a year with this new technology.
E-mail: tpapanikolas@ksl.com
