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Around 10% of Europeans aged 60 and above are reported to suffer from heart arrhythmia.
“Clinical perception of the condition is highly variable,” explains Petr Neužil, Head of the Cardiology Clinic at Na Homolce Hospital, one of Czechia’s main hospitals. “The patient may perceive nothing; they may be completely asymptomatic. Then, they can feel palpitations. They can feel breathless. They cannot breathe. And very often they feel weakness.”
Doctors here treat the condition through ablations made with flexible tubes called catheters. Catheters are placed into blood vessels and guided to the heart. They use heat or cold energy to create tiny scars on the surface of the heart. These scars help break up or insulate the electrical signals that cause irregular heartbeats.
Czech hospitals only have the capacity to treat 10,000 patients each year — around one quarter of those in need. Waiting lists can stretch for up to 10 months. That’s why this hospital is taking part in the clinical study of an innovative catheter able to cover more unhealthy tissue accurately with single, shorter energy pulses.
The solution would safely speed up the process, improve patient recovery time, decrease waiting lists and save on operational costs.
“You spend less time with the catheter. You have a single shot. You lessen the applications, you lessen the manipulations and you lessen the tools you need to get inside,” explains Neužil.
The catheter has been developed by BTL Industries, a family company that has become a global powerhouse for healthcare devices. Its hi-tech medical products are exported to 80 countries. Their new catheter and its control unit have been designed to make the ablation procedure faster and more accurate.
“The doctor places the catheter in the vein and ablates, with a single shot for the whole area all at once, as he needs it. So the time saved ranges from three hours to 15 minutes for ablation,” claims Martin Hanuliak, the company’s Head of Product Management. “The procedure is safer because we apply microsecond — that is 1 millionth-of-a-second — pulses, which ideally destroy the myocardium and spare the other tissue, so the heart heals faster and better.”
The company employs 4,500 people worldwide, including 650 engineers.
“The main difference between the catheter that we are developing here and the standard catheters is that ours is much more complex,” explains Jiří Dašek, product manager at the company. “It contains very small parts that are less than one millimetre in size. The second difference is that our catheter moves, because in the past, the only catheters in use were straight and fixed, without any moving parts.”
Once approved by the health authorities, it is planned for the new catheter and its control unit to also be entirely made in the European Union. One million electronic boards are produced every year at the company’s manufacturing facilities. These parts are then assembled in around 40,000 different medical devices.
“Our turnover usually grows by 10% or 15% on average, depending on the year. But it’s difficult to say which areas are growing. Sometimes cardiology expands faster, sometimes it’s physiotherapy. It depends on the products. If the company would like to keep growing, it needs to innovate,” explains Tomas Drbal, Chief Technology Officer.
The new catheter is spearheading this innovation drive. The device is now being used in clinical studies. Doctors and developers hope that it will be available on EU markets from the beginning of 2028.
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