Innovadores de America, present Franz Freudenthal Tichauer and I welcome him to The Hall of Bolivian Fame: Occluder devices for congenital heart disease The innovation consists of different devices, occluders to treat various types of congenital heart disease that were developed by him, Dr. Freudenthal. Before the 60s, the only way to treat severe congenital heart disease was an “invasive” way or “surgical”. However, thereafter, were developing new treatment techniques through occluding devices capable of entering through cardiac catheterization, which moved very quickly to integrate a fundamental part of the Pediatric and Adult Interventional Cardiology. Congenital heart disease is the leading cause of infant mortality in developed countries and a major in developing countries. The 1.5% of all newborns per year worldwide suffer these alterations. That equates to 2,000,000 people born with congenital heart disease each year. In towns situated about 3,000 meters above sea level, the incidence increases to 2 percent. Dr. Freudenthal has focused his career and his life to creating innovative solutions to treat congenital heart disease and save millions of lives. Therefore, in 2003, founded Kardiozentrum, a center for diagnosis and treatment of congenital heart disease, the company also created PFM SRL Bolivia, dedicated to designing and manufacturing low-cost devices occluders accessible to low-income families. These are versatile and safe release devices during intervention in patients, allowing doctors, to deploy and reposition as often as necessary to its perfect position. They’re made ​​of nitinol (nickel titanium alloy) which gives them the property to maintain adequate memory, greater flexibility in the timing of the intervention and after the device is implanted, gives greater rigidity, aside of achieving greater biocompatibility. In the manufacturing process, they are woven in one piece of nitinol, so they do not need soldering, and other differences which have caused serious complications that have broken portions thereof from operation and subsequent deterioration. Besides having lower levels of corrosion for having no welds. http://premio.innovadoresdeamerica.org/icms/es/2013/favorito_del_publico/7458/franz-freudenthal-tichauer.do