Yesterday, I wrote an entry on stem cells for the heart and lightly touched on the subject of related stem cell delivery equipment. Today, I happened to find a press release from May 17, describing the catheter and how it works. It sounds completely robotic, with the doctor controlling the entire procedure from a control room. Given the high technology that is going into this product, I'm not sure how much they would consider pricing it at and how much the consumables would cost.
A friendly cardiac surgeon who works with robotics told me that each "part" of the robotic machine may cost as much as USD 1,000, each with a shelf-life of 1 operation. As much as I'd like to see it mainstream, it sounds like this might take quite a while to adopt and may remain a training equipment show piece for the time being. But let's not be too pessimistic, this state-of-the art development may have spun off other useful technologies- magnetic catheters may be used for other specific site injections as well...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment