By Scott M. Bruner
EMS1 Product Editor
As vital an organ as the heart is, there’s still many mysteries about it left to solve. The medical field is one step closer, however, from being able to track cardiac rhythms thanks to the work of researchers Yonggang Huang of Northwestern University and John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
They were able to create an electronic device that can literally wrap around the heart and provide a high-density map of the heart’s electrical activity.
“If someone is at risk of ventricular dysrhythmia, something like this could identify the really subtle changes in the heart and the rate at which the technology is changing is interesting,” EMS1 Editorial Advisor Art Hsieh said.
“It’s not unimaginable that in a few years this tech will have some very real implications for EMS.”
Rogers said the device is an ultrathin, flexible form of silicon electronics and sensors (i.e. a sensor ‘tape’) that can wrap the surface of the heart, to provide high speed mapping of electrical activity on the epicardial surface, during beating.
It has been successfully tested on animal tissue by Brian Litt, M.D. of the University of Pennsylvania. He and his research team tested a version of the device that was only 14.4 by 12.8 millimeters. Despite the miniscule size, there are 288 contact points on the device and more than 2,000 transistors. The tests were able to demonstrate that the device was still functional even when immersed in body fluids.
The device receives and processes information from the tissue directly, It’s able to bend and stretch through the flexible electronics that Rogers and Huang developed. In a nutshell, the wires connecting the circuits “pop-up” on the device when it’s stretched allowing it to conform to different shapes of tissue.
“The system, in its current embodiment, can be considered as an advanced diagnostic device to assist in surgical operations and/or to evaluate arrythmias,” Rogers said.
“The data comes out and the power goes in through a thin ribbon cable connected to one end of the circuit sheet. New technologies that we are working on now will provide local sources of power, and a wireless interface.”
This new technology has ramifications for a number of future applications and for medical applications from improving flexible, implantable medical devices to sensors and transmitters. The critical information collected on electrical activity from the heart could potentially provide a significant assist for current cardiological monitoring methods and to help treat heart arrhythmia.
The new device still has some hurdles before it’s a medically, and commercially, viable option r. It’s not wireless, although that’s the next step planned in its evolution, and it would need an adequate power source to transmit data.