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Medical Technology

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• Guests
• For Your Files

We're living longer and better lives thanks to advances in medical technology. Pacemakers, defibrillators, and insulin pumps are just a few of the devices that thousands of people use to live more independently. In this episode, we take a closer look at current medical technologies and discuss what is coming next.

Guests

Paul Iaizzo

Paul Iaizzo

Paul Iaizzo is a professor of surgery and physiology within the University of Minnesota's Academic Health Center. Paul is the principal investigator of the Visible Heart Laboratory and has several patents for medical devices.

Tim Laske

Tim Laske

Dr. Tim Laske is currently the senior program director for transcatheter valves at Medtronic. He is on the Board of Directors for the BioBusiness Alliance of Minnesota and has 32 patents and several publications in the field of biomedical engineering.

For Your Files

Paul Iaizzo, from the University of Minnesota’s departments of surgery and physiology, told us that medical devices are getting smaller than ever before:

"Implantable defibrillator leads … go inside the heart and then send a shock—basically just like shocking it on ‘ER.’ It goes from the can to the heart and creates these electrical fields that then reset the heart and get your natural rhythm back."

Paul also said that doctors use advanced technology to keep track of what the device is actually doing, once it’s been put inside a patient:

"When they implant the devices, they’ll actually put a recording head over the device that’s hooked up to a computer, and they’ll actually program that device at the rate they want, with the different relation voltages they want. And they can also record from that periodically to see how it’s doing."

Tim Laske, senior program director for transcatheter valves at Medtronic, said that the technology behind implantable cardiac devices has now been expanded to treat other conditions:

"The pacemaker was where virtually all of this began, and similar technology is now used for treating Parkinson’s disease. Electrical stimulation to the brain can reduce the symptoms of Parkinson’s and the tremor that is associated with that. And so a similar technology is used, but instead of having a lead that’s placed inside of the heart, in this case the leads are implanted inside of the brain of the patient, and the stimulation there manages the symptoms from Parkinson’s."

Tim also described some of the new directions medical technology is taking:

"In the future, we’re looking into biotechnology, of course. Some of the avenues that have already been gone down are implantable drug pumps. These are implantable electronic devices, like a pacemaker or a defibrillator, but one of the differences is instead of stimulating, it just moves a drug into the body. And this allows the physician to dose the patient either continuously or in boluses, and also to deliver it to a very exact site."