Santa Clara, Calif.-based Shockwave Medical Inc. is working to build its business around the use of intravascular lithotripsy (IVL) in multiple arterial indications. Lithotripsy has been used to destroy kidney stones for decades, but now Shockwave's system is applying that technology to indications including coronary artery disease (CAD), above-the-knee peripheral artery disease (PAD) and below-the-knee PAD that each require a specific catheter.

Tokyo-based Terumo Corp. already had a formal limited partner relationship with one U.S. venture firm, early medical device-focused, Mountain View, Calif.-based Emergent Medical Partners (EMP) that dates to 2013. Now it has added investment in two more venture firms, Santa Clara, Calif.-based Strategic Healthcare Investment Partners and Boston-based Catalyst Health Ventures.

Electrophysiology labs are becoming increasingly central to how patients with cardiac arrhythmias are being treated. For atrial fibrillation (AF), the most common kind of arrhythmia, the standard-of-care ablation procedure involves ablating in the upper left chamber of the heart where each of the four pulmonary veins connect.

Information technology (IT) has been promising for decades, largely since the advent of electronic medical records (EMR), to improve and streamline health care as it has multiplied productivity in countless other industries. In addition to the long-standing problems with EMRs, more recently there have been early disappointments with the latest iteration of IT focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), as big players like IBM Watson and Google have tended to over-promise and under-deliver with algorithms that are poorly matched to the data or the patient need.

Information technology has been promising for decades, largely since the advent of electronic medical records, to improve and streamline health care as it has multiplied productivity in countless other industries. In addition to the long-standing problems with EMRs, more recently there have been early disappointments with the latest iteration of IT focused on artificial intelligence and machine learning, as big players like IBM Watson and Google have tended to over-promise and under-deliver with algorithms that are poorly matched to the data or the patient need.

A little more than a year into starting enrollment, a massive U.S. biomedical research effort led by the NIH has signed up almost one-quarter of the 1 million people it aims to study. The program, now known as "All of Us," is slated to provide health and genetic data on a massive scale.