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TINY silicon needles stabbed into heart tissue can give an early warning of
cell damage during cardiac surgery, say scientists in Spain. Heart cells are
most vulnerable to this kind of damage because the heart is stopped during
operations.

Cardiac surgeons stop the heart because the beating organ is difficult to
work on. This means they have to operate very quickly before the heart cells
start dying from lack of oxygen, says Abdelhamid Errachid of the National
Microelectronics Centre in Barcelona.

When cells begin to run out of oxygen, their acidity and the level of
potassium ions change rapidly. To give surgeons an early warning of these
changes, Errachid and his colleagues have developed silicon needles that are
barely a centimetre long and less than a millimetre wide that can be inserted in
heart tissue during the course of surgery.

The needles contain two transistors that accurately measure low
concentrations of potassium and hydrogen ions in solution for now, says
Errachid. He is planning to test the accuracy of the monitors in heart tissue
soon.

Gary Baxter of University College Hospital in London says such monitoring
would be useful, especially for longer operations. 鈥淓ven a small amount of
damage can be serious because once heart cells are dead, they can鈥檛 be
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