Tuesday, August 24, 2021
PinMed, a medical-device company based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has added two U.S. patents to its portfolio of cardiovascular monitoring, defibrillation, and pacing solutions that ensure patient safety throughout the continuum of care.
U.S. patent 11,020,601 extends the company's intellectual property (IP) portfolio for magnetic resonance (MR)-compatible monitoring, defibrillation, and pacing. These solutions enable safe and accurate functional testing and interventional procedures in the presence of the extremely strong electromagnetic interference that exists in the MRI environment. The two first-in-class MR-compatible solutions (currently available for research use only) are: PELEX-MAX™, which provides high-fidelity, wireless monitoring of 12-lead ECG, blood pressure, and pulse oximetry, and TRIO-MR™, which additionally provides external cardiac defibrillation and pacing.
The solutions were developed for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Clinical Center, the nation's premier clinical research and patient-care hospital. They enable unrestricted use throughout the hospital: during MRI and X-ray imaging, in the ICU, ER, operating room, and interventional lab, as well as during patient transport.
U.S. patent 11,064,968 extends the company's IP for continuous, noninvasive, and nonobtrusive tracking of central arterial blood pressure and key cardiovascular indicators. While central blood-pressure monitoring has long been a gold standard, it requires the insertion of an intravascular catheter, which can be performed only in the hospital. Peripheral blood-pressure measurements (from the arm, wrist, or finger) are less accurate and cannot be used for continuous monitoring. To overcome these limitations, PinMed developed an innovative, cuff-free mapping approach to track central pressure noninvasively, without sacrificing patient safety or comfort. The prototype APEX-Centro™ system (currently available for research use only) has been successfully tested in a diverse group of individuals and showed excellent accuracy compared with currently used clinical-grade systems.
"The ability to ensure patient safety anytime, anywhere, including the challenging MRI environment, is vitally important," said Dr. Vladimir Shusterman, PinMed's President and Chief Scientist. "The development of these innovative solutions, which address essential clinical needs, required years of work and significant investments. We are grateful to the NIH and Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse for their support, which enabled us to bring these solutions to their current advanced stage, and to our research collaborators at the University of Iowa, who performed the first tests in the clinical environment. We are looking forward to making our systems available to clinicians in the near future."
