Image Credit: St. Jude Medical
St. Jude Medical today announced FDA approval of its Assura™ portfolio of implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) and cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators (CRT-Ds).The new implantable defibrillators feature SecureSense™ RV Lead Noise Discrimination, an algorithm that expands the St. Jude Medical ShockGuard® Technology and offers advanced sensing options designed to reduce the incidence of inappropriate shocks for patients with these devices.
According to St. Jude’s announcement:
Johns Hopkins’ Sridevi V. Sarma, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering, has devised new seizure detection software that, in early testing, significantly cuts the number of unneeded brain-stimulation therapy that an epilepsy patient would receive.
In 1965, Australian medical device pioneer Noel Gray established Telectronics – Australia’s first manufacturing facility for producing pacemakers that were designed in-house. Telectronics was an innovative developer, achieving some major successes in the early cardiac pacing field, for example, Telectronics’ leads allowed narrowing the pacing pulse to its current nominal of 0.5 milliseconds; encapsulating the pacemaker in titanium instead of epoxy; using a microplasma weld to join the two halves of the pacemaker capsule; creating one of the first rate-responsive ‘demand’ pacemakers; and isolating the pacemaker’s battery in a separate compartment to deal with the problem of leaking mercury-zinc batteries. 
