Why Are Doctors Shifting to Robotic Catheter Systems from Manual Ones?
With the geriatric population (65 years and older) set to grow from 703 million in 2019 to 1.5 billion in 2050, as per the United Nations (UN), the heart disease incidence is rising. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are already the biggest cause of human mortality, leading to 17.9 million deaths each year. As a result, cardiology has become a lucrative career opportunity for people around the world. Nowadays, almost all large medical centers have a cardiology department, while many healthcare settings are dedicated to this discipline.
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As per P&S Intelligence, the growing cardiology departments are expected to propel the robotic catheter systems market to $656.8 million by 2024 from $493.5 million in 2018, at a 5.2% CAGR between 2019 and 2024. An important cardiac procedure, catheterization is performed during stent implantation, myocardial biopsy, coronary angiogram, ablation, and a variety of other procedures. During the procedure, a flexible rubber tube, the catheter, is pushed through a large vein or artery to the desired location in the body.
Such procedures are used to look for blockages in the coronary arteries (angiography), measure the pressure and level of oxygen in the heart, monitor the pumping of the heart, conduct cardiac biopsies, diagnose and treat congenital cardiac structure abnormalities, detect and repair valvular issues, widen a narrowed artery (placing a stent), treat arrhythmias via ablation, and draw blood and administer drugs into the system. Therefore, with the wide application of catheters in cardiology, the volume of such procedures is rising.
Traditionally, catheterization was a manual process, but it has proven to be hazardous to doctors. For instance, medical practitioners regularly complain of overexposure to radiation during interventional cardiac procedures that involve fluoroscopy. Since the brain remains exposed to the X-rays despite doctors wearing aprons made of lead (Pb), they are at a high risk of head and neck cancer. This is why in certain hospitals, pregnant women are not allowed to perform cardiac catheterization, in order to shield them against radiation. Moreover, wearing the heavy lead aprons for long periods can cause orthopedic injuries, including lumbar and cervical disc disease.
As a result, robotic catheterization is gaining increasing popularity around the world. Since these procedures don’t require the doctor to be right next to the patient, they reduce the occupational hazards, including radiation sickness, orthopedic injuries, and infections. Moreover, robotic catheter systems provide doctors with more precision and catheter stability, which ultimately improves the overall patient outcomes. Other advantages of such systems are lesser invasiveness, lesser time consumption in treating blood clots, easier access to remote areas of the heart, and reduced risk of contrast-induced nephropathy.
Around the world, North America is the most-productive robotic catheter systems market on account of its high healthcare spending and rising prevalence of CVDs. The latter of these factors is itself owed partly to the increasing geriatric population, which is expected to reach 84.8 million in the U.S. by 2050, as per the UN. The elderly regularly suffer from heart diseases, which is why the number of older people undergoing cardiac catheterization is quite high in the region.
Hence, as the hazards of manual catheter systems become more apparent, the robotic variants of such systems would become preferred.