Cardiac devices and technologies: Continued rapid rates of development

The primary goals of this last chapter are to: (1) make note of the technologies mentioned earlier in this book, (2) describe some important changes in healthcare and global markets that could have an impact on the use rate of technologies being developed, and (3) discuss several other future opportunities in the cardiac device arena. It should be noted that the chapters of this third edition were updated, and new ones were added to specifically describe recent critical advances in cardiac device technologies and/or clinical applications. There are also other areas of importance in cardiac treatment such as biological approaches to disease management (stem cell therapy), genomics (diagnostics and gene therapy), proteomics, and/or tissue engineering, all of which may have a major impact on the future of cardiac clinical care; however, detailed discussions of these approaches are beyond the scope of this book.