Serving The Structural Heart Market With A Portfolio of Advanced Laser Processing Capabilities
Structural heart disease is a broad market involving multiple conditions mainly with the heart’s anatomical structures— valves, chambers, walls, pockets, or the muscles and their functions. It’s a fast-growing dynamic field in heart medicine and given the constant advancements in technology, the need and demand for distinct minimally invasive procedures has been increasing.
AMETEK EMC has been meeting and delivering the emerging demand for minimally invasive structural heart procedures and critical cardiac components with our innovative technologies and expertise for several decades. We have adapted ourselves to the latest and the most advanced capabilities in laser processing to meet the need. In addition to helping in engineering and manufacturing advanced structural heart device components, we also help improve existing medical devices in various vascular projects.
Structural Heart Disease Procedures
One type of structural heart procedure is catheter-based. These procedures involve a catheter introduced into the body though the peripheral arteries. Frequently the catheters are made of small flexible hollow tubes that allow a variety of instruments and implants to be passed through them to repair a defect or to deliver treatment devices into the inside of the heart itself. Another type of structural heart procedure is instrument based which involves a stiff shaft the goes into the body in the chest and straight into the heart section that needs surgical repair or treatment. Of course, open heart surgery is also regularly performed on patients that require structural heart repairs. In many cases, if the evidence and expert diagnosis allow, minimally invasive structural heart procedures are given priority over high-risk and longer recovery open-heart surgeries. Structural heart procedures also differ greatly from case to case.
One of the most common structural heart procedures in the last ten years has been transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR). During TAVR a substitute aortic valve is placed inside the old diseased aortic valve to facilitate better valve function. AMETEK EMC has been involved with engineering development and manufacturing procedures of aortic heart valve frames for decades.
Precision laser cut stainless steel tubing, laser welded assembly of delivery shafts and micro-blasting
Another common structural heart procedures these days is the left atrium appendage occluder (LAAO). The most common why to occlude the left atrium in patients that have AF or are at risk of blood clots is to percutaneously introduce a nickel titanium (Nitinol) structure that has been coated into the left atrium. This can isolate the left atrium appendage and effectively eliminates the risk of further problems. These devices are introduced through long flexible laser cut catheter shafts and the Nitinol frame is often laser cut and electro-polished finished as well.
A few of the lesser know but still troublesome areas within the heart that need repair or replacement from time to time are the mitral heart valve. This can be addressed through transcatheter mitral valve replacement (TMVR) and the tricuspid sections or transcatheter mitral tricuspid treatment (TMTT). These procedures will require extremely flexible catheter shafts as well as precision implants. The implants might be Nitinol but possible could be high grade stainless or other “spring” like alloys of metal. Many of these components can be laser cut and the flexible shafts require laser welded assembly as well.
One last area of structural heart repair that is starting to get more traction has to do with treatment of reverse pressure differentials in the heart. These problems lead to heart failure and can be treated by allowing the heart chambers to stabilize pressures withing themselves. This requires shunts to be installed surgically between specific heart chambers in specific locations. While not necessarily pumping more blood to the heart, the heart muscle itself can “rest” more when chamber pressures are allowed to balance. The procedures require flexible catheters again as well as flexible Nitinol implants that can be laser cut and finished at AMETEK EMC.
In percutaneous structural heart treatment one feature is common regardless of the procedure, a robust flexible delivery systems. AMETEK EMC specializes in producing delivery systems laser-cut flexible shafts, laser-cut “garages” for heart valve frames, and laser-welded delivery shaft assemblies for the catheter-based heart procedures. Most of our structural heart disease devices are developed and manufactured at our Waukegan, Illinois facility. Laserage’s ability to laser weld reliably key implant metal assemblies facilitate our laser processed solutions to offer reliability, accuracy, better patient outcomes, lower manufacturing & operational costs, and advanced functionalities to our clients.
What Makes AMETEK EMC An Outstanding Player in the Structural Heart Device Market?
Well, it’s simple, AMETEK EMC offers you endless possibilities. We collaborate with all our three (3) brands Laserage, Avicenna, and TSE to work on breakthrough components and assemblies for our customers and their patients. We have accumulated everything you’d need to manufacture highly advanced components for structural heart devices. With 40 years’ experience in the medical device market to a team of highly experienced engineers, who focus on meeting or exceeding customer expectations in the surgical instrument field development, pre-production, commercialized manufacturing, supply chain management, and quality assurance capabilities we can meet the need. We have experienced it all. To ensure the best outcomes for our Structural Heart market component and assembly solutions give AMETEK EMC a try.