SAN FRANCISCO — If you happened to be a Martian visiting this city last week, you might have thought that big event downtown at the Moscone Convention Center was the Medtronic Scientific Sessions, not the Heart Rhythm Society Scientific Sessions.

Disembarking from the plane and heading to the baggage claim at San Francisco International (assuming Martians do regular air travel — fuel costs and all — not UFOs), the Martian would have been handed a map to help him/her/whatever, courtesy of and bannered as from Medtronic.

Then approaching the Moscone Center, there would be these huge — no, mammoth — Medtronic posters on the outside walls of the center, and circling about, something that looked like golf carts on steroids, carrying huge flat-screens, further bannering the company's imaging technologies.

"Rovers," we were told, and looking very interplanetary-friendly.

Inside the center, festooning the facings of the steps floor to floor were something very much like bumper stickers saying alternately, Medtronic/VISION 3D/ Medtronic/VISION 3D (but who took the steps? — you observed these while riding the escalators).

Center-stage in the exhibit hall, there was Medtronic with its usual huge footprint — with the centerpiece of its exhibit something our Martian really might have related to: a 16-square-foot cube, tipped on one point and flashing in multi-colored array, "VISION 3D Devices, Data management and Delivery & lead systems."

And then if the Martian happened to be media-minded, he/she/whatever would notice a veritable avalanche of press releases concerning a similar avalanche of new product announcements from the company.

And our curious Martian/media person might have wondered: "How much did all of this cost?"

Instead Medical Device Daily took care of that for our off-planet being, by asking a Medtronic representative about that.

"An appropriate investment," the representative advised with a smile, especially given the very large number of physician/clinician/customer attendees at the 29th HRS sessions.

— Don Long, Executive Editor

HRS notebook

GE, Biosense partnering on electrophysiology ultrasound

A Medical Device Daily

Building on the same relationship that successfully integrated GE Healthcare's (Waukesha, Wisconsin) CardioLab IT Recording System and Biosense Webster's (Diamond Bar, California) Carto Mapping System, GE has reported that it is expanding its strategic alliance with Biosense to develop real-time ultrasound imaging for use in electrophysiology procedures.

Electrophysiology focuses on treating abnormal heart rhythms that, according to the .(Dallas), account for 20% of heart disease deaths. Ablation, in which an electrophysiologist eliminates the tissues of the heart contributing to a disturbance, has a high success rate (84% to 87%) but, because of the complexity and length of the procedure, it is performed somewhat infrequently.

Mark Langer, general manager of GE Healthcare's Interventional Cardiovascular Ultrasound business, said better visualization technologies can change that.

"This new step in our alliance is a natural extension of our long-standing technology partnership with Biosense Webster," he said. "In this new development, we are integrating GE's capabilities in high-performance ultrasound imaging with the leading EP catheter technologies from Biosense Webster."

Together, said Langer, "we will create new imaging solutions for intracardiac therapies, augmenting current technologies with new real-time visualization of the cardiac anatomy and therapy catheters."