Off the wire
• Commentary: Ignoring other minorities not a proper way to address diversity issue at Oscars  • Belarus attracts Belgian investors to Great Stone industrial park  • Spotlight: Damascus attempts to lure rebels into settlements as truce largely holds  • Ireland's PM says his party to engage "fully' with other parties  • U.S. FDA issues Zika guidelines for human cell, tissue donations  • Roundup: Canada's GDP grows by 1.2 pct in 2015  • 1st LD Writethru: U.S. stocks surge on strong data  • Conflict, displacement continue to affect people's access to food in CAR: UN agencies  • U.S. FBI, Apple face off before Congress over encrypted iPhone  • 1st LD Writethru: U.S. dollar falls despite upbeat data  
You are here: 　 Home

Stanford launches trial of heart pump designed for remote monitoring

Xinhua, March 2, 2016 Adjust font size:

Researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine have joined a multicenter clinical trial of a new version of a heart pump designed to allow remote monitoring.

To start with, the Stanford team led by Richard Ha, a clinical assistant professor of cardiovascular medicine, implanted the new pump, a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD, on Jan. 21 in a patient with heart failure.

Built by ReliantHeart Inc., the new LVAD, called the HeartAssist 5, has built-in wireless monitors designed to alert clinicians if blood-flow problems develop.

"This would be the first device that we could potentially monitor from a distance," said Ha, who is also a heart and lung transplant surgeon at Stanford Health Care and surgical director of the ventricular assist device program.

Since 1984, the LVAD has been used to restore blood flow when the left ventricle fails to pump enough blood to sustain life. Most often, the pumps serve as a bridge to keep patients alive while they wait for a donor heart.

Dipanjan Banerjee, medical director of the mechanical circulatory support program at Stanford, said the new device "has an ultrasound probe incorporated that directly measures blood flow generated by the device, as opposed to other LVADs, which estimate flow."

"More accurate measurements of flow may allow us to fine-tune the device speed to match the patient's needs," said Banerjee.

The remote-monitoring capabilities could also help patients who live far away from cardiologists with LVAD expertise. Currently, patients are required to make frequent checkup visits in the six months following surgery.

It has some additional features that are expected to improve patient outcomes, including a smaller motor designed to help reduce blood clotting, and a sensor to measure blood-flow speed.

To evaluate the device's safety and efficacy, the randomized trial is being conducted at 15-20 sites, with a plan to involve 192 patients on the heart transplant list. Half will be implanted with the new version of the device, and the other half with the regular version.

Stanford said it plans to recruit 20 heart failure patients for the study, and 10 will receive the new device. Endit