In 1999 he publicly supported NATO strikes in the Balkans, arguing that a policy of pacifist non-intervention only played into the hands of dictators.His expertise was in cardiology (uninhibited by his chain-smoking), and the heart and its emotions seemed to intrigue him more as the years passed.
Now a number of treatments for heart failure are in the pipeline.This amounts to a "seismic shift in the clinical landscape" for acute heart failure, says Martin Cowie, a professor of cardiology at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London.
Harald Kühl, a professor of cardiology at the hospital, says that patients who have been given heart-valve replacements in the morning are now usually back on their feet the same evening and discharged the next day.The main operating room in Aachen is larger than normal and crammed full of advanced imaging technologies.
Their product ranges are complementary: Medtronic excels at specialist gear for cardiology, neurology and diabetes; Covidien's strengths include tools for general surgery.
Tim van Biesen of Bain, a consultancy, believes that patients will need some kind of financial incentive to use smart pills.But Leslie Saxon, chief of cardiology at the University of Southern California, argues the reverse.
This is because treatments for heart attacks have been steadily improving over the years whereas heart failure has remained something of a Cinderella in cardiology.
Trials in animals have proved promising so far, and EBR Systems is hoping to begin human implantations some time in 2010.Meanwhile Heinrich Wieneke, an assistant professor of cardiology at the West German Heart Centre in Essen, is working on another leadless approach.
The foundation of the field of cardiology was laid in 1628, when English physician William Harvey published his observations on the anatomy and physiology of the heart and circulation.
Today the discipline of nuclear cardiology provides a means of measuring blood flow and contraction in heart muscle through the use of radioisotopes.
Their results, published recently in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology and the European Heart Journal, have implications for medical imaging in other fields.In the first of the three studies, angiographers looked at image sequences in which each frame had been compressed using JPEG with a compression ratio of 6 1, 10 1 or 16:16
This too can improve blood flow and further trials are planned.Two American biotechnology companies, Amgen and Cytokinetics, reported results from a trial of a drug called omecamtiv mecarbil to a recent congress held in Amsterdam by the European Society of Cardiology.
