Year: 2012-13

Company: Edwards Lifesciences

Liaison(s): Alex Holland

Edwards Lifesciences is the global leader in the science of heart valves and hemodynamic monitoring. Founded in 1958, Edwards has grown into a global company with a presence in approximately 100 countries and more than 7,800 employees around the world. Edwards focuses on medical technologies that address large and growing patient populations in which there are significant unmet clinical needs, such as structural heart disease and critical care monitoring. Edward’s hemodynamic monitoring instruments measure cardiovascular system parameters that are derived from sampled data acquired by sensors. Typically, sensors are attached to, or integrated within catheters which are inserted into blood vessels. Occasionally, sensors may be placed externally to the patient to provide less invasive sensor information. Edwards has created a proprietary biomedical engineering platform to support the rapid development of biomedical algorithms for these hemodynamic monitoring instruments. The core goal of the Edwards TMP is to facilitate the software design, implementation, and testing of Edwards biomedical engineering platform. The project focuses on two interrelated subprojects: physiological modeling and statistical performance testing of experimental/ simulation data. The key objective of physiological modeling is to complete development of a physiological mathematical model to generate realistic, simulated blood pressure signals coupled with cardiovascular parameters. The objective for the statistical performance testing is to develop a library of hemodynamic algorithms. In support of this project, the team has developed an application programming interface to read/ write patient signals and to maintain database archives encoded in the Edwards signaling format.