Check this out:
An 81-year-old woman with a mercury-zinc powered permanent pacemaker experienced the sudden pain on her pacemaker pocket followed by an explosion. We are aware of no other report of the spontaneous and symptomatic bursting of a generator battery with fracture of the pulse generator capsule.
Emphasis mine. It’s an old paper (1987) and you can get the full text for free at the journal’s site, here.
Crazy, huh?
I can’t find this information anywhere — how much energy is applied per pulse by a typical pacemaker? I’m sure it depends on lead implantation and so on, but there must be some reasonable range used for the design of the devices.
A related question I’m also having trouble answering is “what is the typical pain threshold for cardiac stimulation?”. Any pointers to answers are welcome. The fact that most of the (potentially) relevant papers are locked up and not indexed by Google is not helping.
Suw Charman-Anderson made a pledge to post about a woman in technology that he she admired, as long as 1000 other people signed up to do the same. (Details here.) It sounded like a great idea, so I signed right up. Then I puzzled for a long while about whom I should write.
I considered writing about Anousheh Ansari, a serial tech entrepreneur who has also gone into space (something I dreamed of as a child), but I don’t actually know that much about her, and she’s rather high profile.
Then I realized the answer has been staring me in the face — I should write about my doctoral advisor, Professor Natalia Trayanova.
Dr.Trayanova is a leader in the cardiac electrophysiology field, a field both historically and currently dominated by men. While I have met many talented women with promising careers in the field, very few of them have been full professors, leaders of labs, commonly invited speakers, or HRS fellows. All of these are true of Dr.Trayanova. Furthermore, along with a few other labs ( many of which are ‘related’ to hers ), she has been at the forefront of cardiac simulation technology since the year I was born (1983). She has helped to drive cardiac simulations from mathematical models of the electrical fields induced by excitable fibers in a volume conductor all the way to full-scale models of the human heart derived from medical images, running on massive supercomputers.
I think she is the perfect example of a woman in technology that can be a role model to aspiring women (per the stated goals of the Ada Lovelace Day project).
Happy first Ada Lovelace day, everyone!
I didn’t have to look hard for a Hearty Friday image this week — this one dropped into my RSS reader. Happy Friday the 13th and Valentine’s Day to everyone.
We deal with 3D models all of the time, and when it’s possible to manipulate them in a viewer program, it’s relatively easy to get a sense of 3D objects from a 2D screen. It’s a lot harder with static images. That’s where cross-eye stereograms come in. All you need to see 3D are images from two perspectives, and your eyes and brain. I’ve mentioned these images before, here, with a link to some nice photographs using the same technique. Today while making some figures, I decided to do this with my very-high-resolution model of the right-ventricular free wall. I think it turned out pretty well.
You’ll want to click on the image and look at the full size rather than using the thumbnail. There’s a really large version that you can download and try here. The idea is just to cross your eyes and make the images line up. Sometimes it helps if you sit back from the computer a bit.
Note, this requires doing the opposite thing with your eyes compared with how you view a random dot stereogram.
