Hospitals

Good Morning America visits new heart imaging device in Cleveland

Dr. Marco Costa found a second blocked artery in Mack Bailey’s heart — and demonstrated […]

Dr. Marco Costa found a second blocked artery in Mack Bailey’s heart — and demonstrated to a Good Morning America audience the first vascular-imaging technology based on optical coherence tomography (OCT) — at the same time Thursday.

Costa is an interventional cardiologist and director of the cardiovascular research institute at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, Ohio. Bailey is a 60-year-old Clevelander with had a heart attack and is being treated by Costa.

Both agreed to be filmed and interviewed by the NBC morning news show because University Hospitals is the first — and so far only — hospital to use the C7-XR Imaging System and accompanying C7 Dragonfly Imaging Catheter made by LightLab Imaging Inc. during patient heart procedures.

While using the technology to place a stent in one of Bailey’s heart arteries, Costa found a second blocked artery that had not shown up on images of Bailey’s heart. Costa ended up placing two stents, that day.

“If he had gone home this weekend without having this procedure today, he would have gone home with a very nice, well-placed stent in the vessel that did not cause the heart attack,” Costa said during the Good Morning America segment.

The LightLab system uses near-infrared light to produce high-resolution, real-time images that are better and faster than images produced by competing ultrasound technology. The system recently was approved for sale by the Food and Drug Administration. UH Case Medical Center was the core laboratory on the FDA approval study and analyzed the study’s results, according to the Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine blog.

On Wednesday, St. Jude Medical Inc. (NYSE: STJ) in Little Canada, Minnesota, said it would buy LightLab for $90 million in cash. The Minnesota medical device company expects LightLab’s technology to add $20 million to the top line of its cardiovascular division in the second half of this year.

St. Jude Medical already has fractional flow reserve (FFR) technology to measure the effects of coronary procedures. The addition of the C7-XR system would make it the first company to offer both OCT and FFR technologies to enable clinicians to see and measure vessel characteristics that are invisible or difficult to observe with older imaging technologies.

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