New Medical Devices Invention, Development, and Use (1988) / Chapter Skim
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Inventing Medical Devices: Five Inventors' Stories
Inventing Medical Devices: Five Inventors' Stories
Pages 13-34
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From page 13... ...
Moritz thought that Technicon was not really interested in Skeggs's instrument, and my father dismissed the matter as routine. Three years later Ray Roesch, Technicon's only salesman at the time, was visiting Joseph Kahn at the Cleveland Veterans Administration Hospital.
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At that time, laboratory instruments were usually sold by catalog salesmen or by mail from specification sheets listing instrument specifications, price, and perhaps product benefits. In contrast, we decided that
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I estimate that we have trained about 50,000 people to use Auto Analyzers. Introduction of Technicon's continuous-flow Auto Analyzer in 1957 profoundly changed the character of the clinical laboratory, allowing a hundredfold increase in the number of laboratory tests performed over a 10-year period.
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Dr. Wright observed that by removing the plasma from a blood donation and then reinfusing red blood cells in the donor, one could bleed the donor twice a week instead of once every 7 weeks.
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Before the invention of the pneumatic extradural ICP monitor in 1980, monitoring of ICE was generally accomplished by means of fluid-filled catheters (or other similar appliances) with one end in direct contact with the patient's
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had been on the market for several years, but the pressure sensor in that device is very complicated and fragile, is slow to respond to changes, and is limited in accuracy. Thus, although that device established the usefulness of extradural ICP monitoring and has found application in certain medical centers, its use has been limited because of the complexity and inaccuracy of its sensing system.
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From page 19... ...
Negotiations with venture capital firms and other conventional sources of capital proved unsuccessful, because acceptance of the extradural method of ICP monitoring was limited by the existing product, and it was difficult to project just how an improved product would affect market growth. Therefore, conservative sales projections were used in the business plan.
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I clearly recall that at my residency interview at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, when the governing board of six senior surgeons asked me whether I intended to do
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There I was put in the care of a second-year resident who was clearly too busy with his own clinical problems to spend much time with me. He sat me down on a stool in a little booth where a patient sat next to a box of ophthalmological trial lenses.
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From page 22... ...
Because retinoscopy depends on the examiner's skill, which varies considerably among practitioners, and the patient's subjective responses, are affected by the patient's personality, the final judgment of the patient's visual status often requires complex decision making. Shortly after beginning my work in the clinic, I drew up plans for the construction of an electronic retinoscope and presented my ideas to the research committee of the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary.
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From page 23... ...
The New York Eye and Ear Infirmary gave me a key to the library and research building and, over the course of about a year and with the aid of my attorney friend, I built a working model of the electronic retinoscope. The instrument was crude—the photocells were housed in the film carrier of an old view camera, the image of the subject eye was formed by a telescope made from the mailing tube that had held my diploma from medical school, and many of the parts were surplus that I had purchased at the outdoor hardware stalls on Canal Street in New York.
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Andrew Gage, and I implanted the first self-powered implantable cardiac pacemaker in an experimental animal. In October of that year, Dr.
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To feed my family, I occasionally worked as an electronics technician, building intermediate-frequency amplifiers for what was later to become the Arecibo, Puerto Rico, radiotelescope. One day, in an adjacent lab, I saw Cornell graduate student Frank Noble measuring blood pressure in a rat by recording the change in tail size as a pulse of blood traversed it.
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Gage, and I had our first model cardiac pacemaker implanted in a dog. Our experimental work was done on dogs that had been put into complete heart block by occluding the atrioventricular (AV)
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The device had to be called a "Chardack-Greatbatch Implantable Cardiac Pacemaker" in all company brochures, advertising, and communications, both within the company and without. The quality control program reported directly to me for 10 years.
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(The Minuteman space program later adopted much the same approach for high-reliability missile components after we published our procedures.) In 1964 Barough Berkovits (also a member of our chapter of the Professional Group in Medical Electronics when the American Optical Company Medical Electronics Division was in Buffalo)
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From page 29... ...
Today, nearly every pacemaker uses a lithium battery of some sort, and nearly every surgical intervention for a pacemaker problem is electrode-related rather than battery-related. Wheelchairs for the Third World RALF HOTCHKISS For the past 20 years I have been involved in wheelchair design and innovation.
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From page 30... ...
During that year, I developed a prototype of a Third World-appropriate wheelchair at my shop in Oakland, California, and made eight trips to Nicaragua to help the independent living center organize its shop, purchase its tools and equipment, develop wheelchair repair and modification techniques, and begin making wheelchairs. Under a second contract with Appropriate Technology International, we completed the Nicaragua project and began to spread the wheelchair design
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From page 31... ...
Lightweight aluminum folding chairs, weighing as little as 30 pounds fully equipped, are now available at high cost. · Traction and Maneuverability: A skilled rider of a four-wheeled, rear-drive chair can easily shift all of his or her weight to the drive wheels, giving full traction over rough terrain.
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From page 32... ...
The prototype design changed as I discovered what else was not available: hardened bolts, concentric tubing sizes, suitable ready-made hubs, and more. We are still trying to figure out how to make a high-resiliency, low-cost front wheel, but everything else is now made out of locally available materials.
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From page 33... ...
THE FUTURE The ability of the independent living center in Managua to proceed beyond prototype development into marketing of wheelchairs has been hampered by the problems the country has had in maintaining a general inventory of basic materials. Another problem is that the disabled people who run the independent living center and who grew up in poverty are not used to the concept of purchasing in bulk.
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From page 34... ...
A new project, Appropriate Technology for Independent Living, has begun in California to carry on the development and dissemination of our wheelchair design worldwide.
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