US Patent Issued to St. Jude Medical Cardiology Division on June 17 for "Heat treating to improve synthetic leaflet motion and coaptation" (Minnesota Inventors)

ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 19 -- United States Patent no. 12,329,880, issued on June 17, was assigned to St. Jude Medical Cardiology Division Inc. (St. Paul, Minn.).

"Heat treating to improve synthetic leaflet motion and coaptation" was invented by Jay Reimer (Saint Paul, Minn.) and Yousef F. Alkhatib (Edina, Minn.).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "A prosthetic heart valve includes a support structure and a valve assembly. The valve assembly includes a cuff and a plurality of leaflets, each of the prosthetic leaflets being composed of a synthetic material. The prosthetic leaflets have a closed condition in which the prosthetic leaflets coapt to restrict blood from flowing in a retrograde direction th...