April 2, 2010 – A federal jury yesterday found Medtronic’s CoreValve transcatheter aortic valve willfully infringes on patents owned by Edwards Lifesciences. Edwards said it intends to seek a permanent injunction. The jury also awarded Edwards $74 million in damages, and the willfulness finding allows Edwards to seek increased damages of up to three times that amount, the company said.

March 31, 2010 - The number of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans performed increases each year, as does the number of people with implanted cardiac devices.

March 31, 2010 — Boston Scientific Corp. recently announced that it has stopped shipment and is retrieving field inventory of all its implantable cardioverter defibrillators (ICDs) and cardiac resynchronization therapy defibrillators (CRT-Ds), after a planned process review revealed that two manufacturing process changes were not submitted for FDA approval.

March 30, 2010 – To accelerate development, incubating and commercializing new cardiovascular technology, the Global Cardiovascular Innovation Center (GCIC) plans to open a new building in May. It will house start-up companies developing new solutions for the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease.

March 30, 2010 – The FDA granted an investigational device exemption (IDE) for a clinical study of the Freedom portable driver system to power SynCardia's Total Artificial Heart. The study is designed to demonstrate that stable Total Artificial Heart patients in the U.S. can manage their portable driver outside the hospital environment, including at home and in step-down facilities.

March 29, 2010 - Optical coherence tomography (OCT) not only has the potential to identify vulnerable plaques, but in countries like Japan, it is already a standard follow up to stenting procedures to determine if the stent has effectively widened the affected artery and the area is free of blood clots.