NI monitor may improve diagnosis of heart attack

A monitor designed and built in Belfast could help to improve accurate diagnosis of heart attack in patients suffering chest pains. The company promoting the device is seeking approval to sell it in the US.

The research project to develop the new electrocardiogram (ECG) was a joint effort by the University of Ulster, Jordanstown, the Royal Victoria Hospital, and the Belfast company Meridian Medical Technologies Ltd, according to the firm's managing director, Dr Peter Charalambous.

The company is a subsidiary of Maryland-based Meridian Medical Technologies. The US firm initially built its business with the EpiPen, an auto-injector used to self-administer emergency drugs, for example to combat allergic reactions after bee stings. The company also sells EpiPens to the US and NATO to deliver nerve gas antidote to military personnel.

The new device developed in Belfast is known as the Prime ECG System and is used to detect and interpret the electrical signals that drive the heart. It is an advance on the standard 12lead ECG machine, used for 60 years and a feature of every hospital in the world.

Any patient presenting with chest pains is immediately hooked up to an ECG machine to determine whether a heart attack has occurred. Misdiagnosis is common, however. On average only one in three of those with chest pains has actually had a heart attack, according to a report in the New England Journal of Medicine. Yet 160,000 patients a year leave hospitals in the US with undiagnosed life-threatening attacks.

Meridian in Belfast had done some contract research work for the Russian space programme on the development of a body harness, used to monitor vital medical functions of cosmonauts, Dr Charalambous said. This harness approach was then developed for the Prime ECG machine.

The Prime ECG machine uses 80 leads and so gives much more information about the heart and its electrical signals, and the specially-designed harness allows the contact sensors to be placed in position very quickly. "They can literally be applied in minutes," he said.

Existing devices use a pen tracing on a strip of paper which shows the characteristic heartbeat signal. The Belfast device delivers more information, given as a two-dimensional colour image for quick interpretation, Dr Charalambous said.

The company worked in collaboration with Prof John Anderson of Jordanstown and Prof Jennifer Adgey of the Royal Victoria Hospital. "It has taken us about eight years to get where we are," Dr Charalambous said.

The device is already approved for use in European hospitals and similar clearance is now being sought from the US Food and Drug Administration, he said. The company hopes to have this within six months.