Stereotaxis has announced that Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston, USA, has installed the its Niobe ES system, which according to the company, is the only paediatric hospital in the country to offer the latest generation remote magnetic navigation platform for ablation procedures.
Texas Children’s is recognised as one of the top children’s hospitals in USA, ranked number two nationally in cardiology and heart surgery by US News & World Report.
“We are privileged to provide this cutting-edge treatment for our patients with arrhythmias in whom cardiac ablations are deemed necessary,” says Jeffrey Kim, director of the Arrhythmia and Pacing Service at Texas Children’s. “With the Niobe system, we can more quickly and aggressively target and ablate abnormal electrical impulses in young children and patients with structurally complex anatomy. This is an important tool in our armamentarium for this highly specialised procedure and undoubtedly advances our approach to paediatric cardiac rhythm management.”
Kim is one of four physicians utilising the Niobe system at the hospital, primarily for patients with congenital heart disease or Wolf-Parkinson-White syndrome. The Arrhythmia and Pacing Service at Texas Children’s, which is one of the highest volume paediatric centres in the country for invasive electrophysiology studies, first installed Stereotaxis technology in March 2009. In 2012, the hospital conducted a comparative study of the magnetic platform versus manual catheter navigation for ablation of accessory pathways in children, recording significantly reduced fluoroscopy times in the magnetic patient group, an essential benefit for vulnerable paediatric patients.
