MA Medical Company Licenses Technology that can Predict Heart Attacks

Chelmsford-based, Zoll Medical Corp., is developing medical devices that will be able to predict heart attacks and other severe cardiac episodes.

The Massachusetts company is the world’s leading manufacturer of defibrillators and other resuscitative equipment; equipment that can bring people back from the brink of death. Using new, breakthrough technology,  Zoll may be able to prevent patients from ever getting to the brink in the first place.

Just imagine if Zoll’s heart attack-predicting devices were around a few decades earlier: Jerry Garcia would still be rockin’, Frank Sinatra would still be crooning and John Candy would be around to star in a sequel to Cool Runnings.

It may sound like science-fiction, but Zoll’s recent agreement with Vicor Technologies, Inc. now provides the Massachusetts company access to Vicor’s proprietary PD2i nonlinear algorithm. This algorithm can predict the risk of heart attacks and other serious cardiac events in certain patient populations.

The PD2i technology works by predicting a patient’s susceptibility to an abnormal increase in heart rate, known as tachyarrhythmia, which is an indicator that a lethal cardiac event could occur imminently. In a recent public statement, Zoll’s president, Jonathan A. Rennert, said, “This technology furthers our ability to not only improve outcomes from sudden cardiac arrest and save people’s lives, but also to predict and prevent such events from occurring.”

Knowing in advance that a heart attack is likely to occur would provide patients and/or caregivers with time to intervene and to take action before the use of Zoll’s resuscitative devices, like defibrillators, becomes necessary.

Zoll plans on incorporating Vicor’s PD2i technology into some of its current medical devices, but also plans on developing new products around the technology.

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Posted by erik devaney on Aug 16 2011. Filed under Health, Technology, Top Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry