President A P J Abdul Kalam will inaugurate India's first indigenous Cardiac Catheterisation Lab at the CARE Hospital during his visit to Hyderabad on November 25 and 26, 2002. He will be the chief guest at the silver jubilee celebrations of the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) on November 26. Besides, he will also participate in the convocation of the Nizam Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS).
Dr Kalam's association with CARE Hospitals goes back to its inception in 1997. The Kalam-Raju stent developed by Dr Soma Raju, Director of CARE Hospitals in consultation with Dr Kalam, has brought down the cost of the metallic device that keeps the heart vessels open, from Rs 50,000 to Rs 5,000. The entire operation now costs around Rs 30,000 instead of Rs 75, 000 earlier. After becoming the President, Dr Kalam inaugurated the hospital's Telemedicine facility at Bhopal Hospital, which was constructed in memory of the victims of the gas tragedy there.
According to Dr Arun Tiwari, Director of CARE Foundation, the indigenous Cath Lab developed at the hospital using some imported components would make heart scanning more affordable to the poor and the needy. The prototype had been developed by the Mumbai-based Alpha X-Ray Technologies in association with CARE doctors and software engineers.
When Pharmabiz visited the Hospital on Wednesday, the Lab had been undergoing some last-minute fine-tuning. According to a source in the hospital, the President had been monitoring the progress of the Lab using the software technology. Angiograms were successfully done and the picture quality was reported to be sharp.
Cath Labs are being imported at a cost of Rs 3 crore and the CARE version would cost around Rs 75, 000. This would reduce the cost of cardiological tests like angiogram and angioplasty.
The software that integrates all the complex moves of the Cath Lab had been indigenously developed and the clinical trials had shown that the new imaging equipment can snap and store up to one lakh frames against 75,000 in the imported version.
Dr Tiwari said of the other components, over 55 per cent were indigenous and they would scale this up to 60 per cent in the next model when they would be using carbon composite -the material used in the Agni missile. When full-scale production commenced in a year's time, the Cath Lab would be 100 per cent Indian, he said.
The hospital would be making 12 Cath Labs initially for use in the district hospitals and CARE would be networking the new units across the nation. It has Telemedicine facilities even in Assam.
Dr Tiwari, who returned from China recently, said impressed by the functioning and price, that country had shown keen interest in the new Cath Lab. He refused to go into the details about his visit to China.