For Heart, Home & Hospital

Doctors are always on the watch for more and better gadgets -- in the operating room and laboratory, in their cars when they set out on emergency calls, or to hook onto the patient himself so that he can continue treatment outside a hospital. Promising new devices in each of these categories:

> Anesthetic explosions in the operating room can be properly guarded against only if the anesthesiologist gets an early warning--well before his mixture of gases has actually reached the danger point. Dr. John F. Zeedick of Braddock General Hospital, near Pittsburgh, working with the Mine Safety Appliances Co., has developed a portable combustible gas indicator that can be conveniently hooked into most modern anesthesia machines. Its moving needle shows safe concentrations of gas on a green scale, cautionary readings on an orange scale. When the explosive level is reached, the needle crosses onto a red scale. Dr. Zeedick's machine can be calibrated for five different anesthesia mixtures.

>Tissue examinations under a microscope usually mean that doctors must cut a piece out of the patient. But Western Reserve University's Dr. Charles Long II has invented a way of extending the microscope's eye and putting it into the patient--as far as a hypodermic needle will go. Heart of the system is a pair of tiny bundles containing 10,000 glass fibers, so fine that they fit inside the needle. One bundle carries light into the patient. The other bundle picks up light that is reflected from the tissue under study and carries it back to the microscope, which is attached to the needle.

> Electrocardiograms normally require that the patient go to a physician's office or a hospital, although in some cases a heavy ECG machine is taken to the patient. Now Computer Instruments Corp. of Hempstead, L.I., has miniaturized the ECG with 24 transistors. The result is a box that is crammed with components. But it is little more than 8 in. square and less than 6 in. thick, weighing only 10 Ibs., and it can be plugged into any 110-volt AC line. It makes its diagnostic tracings on standard ECG paper and records all the standard ECG information.

> Cancer-killing chemicals, if they are to do any good, must catch the cancer cells at their most vulnerable moment --when they are reproducing. Since this is a continuous process, continuous infusion of anti-cancer drugs into arteries or veins is usually necessary, requiring a stay of days or weeks in a hospital, at great economic and emotional cost to the patient. But now, Dr. Elton Watkins Jr., inventive director of surgical research at Boston's Lahey Clinic, has devised a compact, clockwork-driven pump that weighs only three-fourths of a pound and can be hung on the patient's chest like a hearing aid. Inside Dr. Watkins' contraption, a plastic reservoir contains about an ounce of anti-cancer drug, usually Methotrexate. The clock motor and pump are so delicate that they are capable of spreading this supply over a week, delivering it via a plastic tube pushed through a small incision into an artery or vein. Patients with cancers of the head, neck and liver have already been helped by home treatment with the Lahey device.

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