Walk inside any hospital around the globe and you are likely to see the bright blue Transonic logo emblazoned on a variety of flow meters and flow probes. But Transonic is equally proud of being the hidden technology that resides “under the hood” in many leading medical devices. This article is the first installment in what will become a semi-regular series covering “Transonic Inside” OEM applications.
Your birth. Your first step. Your high school graduation. Your personal evolution is a pile of moments, adding up to the person you ultimately become. Medical technology works the same way—a gradual accretion of experiences, some minute, some monumental, but always evolutionary. In both personal life and medicine, some moments are pleasant, some are not, like the seconds leading up to a car wreck, or the minutes following a heart attack.
Unfortunately, in the case of the heart attack, getting the best care during those few minutes can make the difference between life and death. The deciding factor may be a single molecule: O2. Of all the things the human body requires, oxygen is the most immediately vital.
ZOLL Medical has developed TherOx SS02 (Super Saturated Oxygen Therapy), the first FDA-approved therapy to reduce infarct size in heart attack patients treated with a stent (PCI). Following a heart attack, doctors focus on reopening coronary flow. However, a large portion of the heart’s blood supply is delivered by microvasculature which often remains blocked due to inflammation. This creates a maddening (and deadly) clinical triangle. Lack of blood flow caused the MI, which in turn causes inflammation, which further restricts blood flow.
ZOLL’s solution is a supersaturated oxygen infusion, delivered post-PCI in an hour-long infusion directly into the patient’s coronary artery. TherOx consists of a console, a cartridge, and a catheter. The entire system requires nothing more from the hospital than a standard oxygen tank and normal saline. The cartridge supersaturates the saline with oxygen and delivers it via catheter. This site-specific delivery of a supersaturated solution allows oxygen to diffuse into the microvasculature, helping to relieve inflammation and restore microvascular flow. Oxygen diffusion and improved microvascular flow help resuscitate ischemic heart tissue.
For metering saline delivery, ZOLL needed the most accurate, reliable flow measurement in the business, so they turned to Transonic. Our flow sensors are OEM inside every TherOx System. Though ZOLL’s technology is new, its undergirding principle is solid. Hyperbaric therapy (which causes the patient’s blood plasma to become saturated with oxygen) has been used for many years to treat everything from bacterial infections to severe burns. ZOLL TherOx has developed a revolutionary way to apply a tried-and-true physiologic principle.
At a glance, evolution can seem like a haphazard process, one animal slowly becoming another in response to the environment trying to stomp it out of existence. In reality, evolution is graceful: the environment applies demands and pressures, and life dances out of the way, finding new and more elegant ways to advance, adapt, to rise again.
Transonic is proud to be OEM inside every TherOx System, and pleased to participate in advancing care for heart attack patients. That’s ZOLL, with a little help from Transonic.
Thanks for reading,
Transonic Systems, Inc
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