Medical Design Briefs - September 2023 - 45

Dissolving Cardiac Device Monitors, Treats Heart Disease
Soft, wireless implant
monitors the heart without
requiring removal.
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL
Nearly 700,000 people in the United
States die from heart disease every year,
and one-third of those deaths result from
complications in the first weeks or
months following a traumatic heart-related
event.
To help prevent those deaths, researchers
at Northwestern and George
Washington (GW) universities have developed
a new device to monitor and
treat heart disease and dysfunction in the
days, weeks or months following such
events. And, after the device is no longer
needed, it harmlessly dissolves inside the
body, bypassing the need for extraction.
About the size of a postage stamp, the
soft, flexible device uses an array of sensors
and actuators to perform more complicated
investigations than traditional
devices, such as pacemakers, can accomplish.
Not only can it be placed on various
sections of the heart, the device also
continuously streams information to
physicians, so they can remotely monitor
a patient's heart in real time. The device
also is highly transparent, allowing physicians
to observe specific heart regions to
make a diagnosis or provide a treatment.
The research was published in the
journal Science Advances.
" Several serious complications, including
atrial fibrillation and heart
block, can follow cardiac surgeries or
catheter-based therapies, " says Northwestern's
Igor Efimov, an experimental
cardiologist who co-led the study. " Current
postsurgical monitoring and treatment
of these complications require
more sophisticated technology than currently
available. We hope our new device
can close this gap in technology. Our
transient electronic device can map electrical
activity from numerous locations
on the atria and then deliver electrical
stimuli from many locations to stop atrial
fibrillation as soon as it starts. "
" Many deaths that occur following
heart surgery or a heart attack could be
prevented if doctors had better tools to
monitor and treat patients in the delicate
weeks and months after these events
take place, " adds GW's Luyao Lu, who
co-led the work with Efimov. " The tool
developed in our work has great potential
to address unmet needs in many programs
of fundamental and translational
cardiac research. "
Efimov is a professor of biomedical engineering
at Northwestern's McCormick
School of Engineering and professor of
medicine at Northwestern University
Feinberg School of Medicine. Lu is an
assistant professor of biomedical engineering
at GW.
This work builds on Efimov's previous
work to develop cardiac implants to monitor
and temporarily pace the heart. In
2021, Efimov and Northwestern professor
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Medical Design Briefs - September 2023

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