Transcripts

"Bill of Health"-Heartsounds

SUSIE GHARIB: Call it the "spark of life," the electrical impulses that keep your heart beating at a steady rate. But genetic disorders and aging can disrupt the heart's healthy rhythm and raise the risk of a heart attack or stroke. As Jeff Yastine reports in his latest "Bill of Health," a new medical technology is offering patients and investors a different way of treating the problem.

JEFF YASTINE, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT CORRESPONDENT: It looks like a surgical suite, but the surgeon sits 10 feet away, in front of a digital control panel and the tool of the trade isn't a scalpel. It's a control stick and a pair of giant magnets mounted on either side of the patient. Those magnets guide a millimeters-thin catheter -- a tiny wire -- through the veins of the body and directly into the heart itself. From there, the surgeon, an electro-physiologist, uses a process called ablation to eliminate the electrical short- circuiting of the heart. The technology was developed by a company called Stereotaxis. It offers electro- physiologists like Dr. Karthik Ramaswamy a digital surgical tool. It's a big change from the way such procedures are usually done.

DR. KARTHIK RAMASWAMY, ELECTROPHYSIOLOGIST, NORTHEAST GEORGIA MED. CENTER: When you're standing at the bedside holding the catheter, all your attention is focused on keeping that catheter still and at the same time you're looking out the corner of your eye at the X-ray. You're looking the other corner of your eye at the electrograms that are flowing across the screen. But with the Stereotaxis system, we can be in the control room and all that data is laid out in front of us. We're still moving the catheter. We're just doing it through the magnets and the computer control.

YASTINE: Stereotaxis is one of a handful of companies developing these magnetic robotic catheter-control systems. CEO Bevil Hogg says it has sold more than a hundred of the devices to hospitals and surgical centers at prices around $1.5 million.

BEVIL HOGG, CEO, STEREOTAXIS: The ability of the system to drive more procedures, to enable the delivery of therapy to more complex locations, to address disease states like atrial fibrillation, which we're currently treating in Europe, and other more complex arrhythmias can make a hospital ultimately earn a return on its investment through incremental procedure volume and shorter procedure times.

YASTINE: The technology is currently approved for treating simple heart arrhythmias. But analysts like Herman Saftlas of Standard & Poor's believe Stereotaxis' non-invasive methods could eventually be used for a lot of other heart problems.

HERMAN SAFTLAS, PHARMACEUTICAL ANALYST, STANDARD & POOR'S: We think that the company's strong platform of operation and cardiac ablation for the treatment of arrhythmias can be leveraged to go further into the treatment of atrial fibrillation and other coronary and peripheral neurological diseases.

Jeff: Atrial fibrillation is a complex heart rhythm ailment affecting up to 2 million Americans and can lead to higher chances of heart attack and stroke. Doctors in Europe already treat the disorder using Stereotaxis gear, but the FDA is requiring further tests before giving its approval for wider use here in the states. Jeff Yastine, NIGHTLY BUSINESS REPORT, "Bill of Health."