Emerging cardiac devices and technologies

In previous chapters, authors provided brief histories of cardiac device development and several fairly thorough discussions of currently employed devices or assessment technologies. To gain insight into how rapidly innovations in the area of cardiac disease are progressing, a search of the US Patent and Trademark Office Website (www.uspto.gov) can simply be searched. Such a search produces an impressive number of companies or individuals attempting to secure intellectual property protection in this clinical category. More specifically, the following are the numbers of published patent applications, identified in November 2004, citing the following key words: • cardiac (18,920 patent applications) • cardiac surgery (1015 patent applications) • Cardiology (1480 patent applications) • cardiac electrophysiology (79 patent applications) • cardiovascular stents (52 patent applications) • cardiac repair (32 patent applications)