Mapping the Human Heart
There’s a guy telling your surgeon what to do — and he ’s no doctor
Jamie Mackie is not a doctor. He never went to medical school and his salary is paltry compared to a surgeon’s. Nevertheless, he spends a 60-hour workweek in scrubs, logging in and out of operating rooms across the United States, outfitted something like an air traffic controller: He wears a headset and microphone while building an atlas of neon veins on the computer screen before him — only a thin lead window separating him from a cardiac surgeon tapping into a femoral artery on the other side.
No, Jamie Mackie (MS ’13, Kinesiology) is not a doctor. He is the voice guiding them; the hands at the keyboard behind a growing medical technology that creates 3D, real-time, electro-anatomical maps of the cardiac system so surgeons can burn scars into precise locations in the human heart. Through a series of catheters and a 3D-mapping system made by the company he works for (Biosense Webster, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson), Mackie creates images of the heart for use during surgery that pinpoint any electrical impulses causing irregularities (arrhythmias) so they can be permanently fixed through cardiac ablation.