The pacemaker and implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICD) revolutionized heart medicine (and gave birth to a multi-billion dollar global industry) by successfully blending detection and therapy into one “smart” device.

The technology notices a faulty heart beat and automatically delivers an electric shock to correct it. Now researchers at the Mayo Clinic are perhaps a year away from commercializing a similar device for deep brain stimulation, (DBS), a still nascent but growing way of using electricity to treat neurological disorders like Parkinson’s and depression.

MedCity News by Thomas Lee, 1/28/2010

Tags: deep brain stimulation, Neurology, Research