DUBLIN — December 3, 2018 — Medtronic plc (NYSE:MDT) today announced the first patient treated in the TERMINATE AF trial, a multi-center study evaluating two surgical ablation devices — the Cardioblate(TM) Irrigated RF (IRF) System and the CryoFlex(TM) Surgical Ablation System — for the treatment of non-paroxysmal (persistent or longstanding persistent) atrial fibrillation (AF) in patients undergoing open-heart surgical procedures.

The UMass Memorial Medical Center in Worcester, Massachusetts, is partnering with Israel-based company CLEW Medical to integrate an AI analytics platform into its Tele-ICU program to help monitor patients and make predictions about life-threatening conditions.

Fractional flow reserve (FFR) assessment before coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) didn’t improve outcomes compared to angiography-guided surgery, Danish researchers reported Nov. 26 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

“We’d better make some rules because otherwise, you can have willy-nilly 3D printing...you can 3D print off your iPhone if you have the right hook-ups, right? But we don’t want that. We want to do really high-quality work," said Frank J. Rybicki, MD, PhD, at the American Heart Association’s 2018 Scientific Sessions in Chicago according to a report by Cardiovascular Business.

While the $69 billion merger between CVS Health and Aetna has been approved by regulators and cleared by the Department of Justice, a federal judge has raised the prospect of not approving the deal, CNBC reported.

Using a deep-learning model, a University of Massachusetts Lowell research team was able to significantly improve the extraction of adverse drug events (ADEs) from electronic health records (EHRs).

Sunrise, Florida-based medical group Mednax announced it is launching an artificial intelligence (AI) incubator focused on creating innovative radiology solutions.

“We need new, improved methods in which as few contrast agents as possible affect as much of the signal-emitting substance, which is typically water," said study author Leif Schröder, PhD, a researcher at the Leibniz Research Institute of Molecular Pharmacology (FMP) in Berlin.

A team in the U.K. published research Nov. 30 suggesting cancer patients are at an elevated risk for major bleeding events and in-hospital death following percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), the most common interventional treatment in patients with coronary heart disease.

Could safer, more affordable diagnostic screening be on the horizon? A new study led by researchers from Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australia, could be a real game-changer for 3D medical imaging.