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ANN DONAHUE

Staff Reporter

Last year was the trip to the Takoradi River Valley in western Ghana. Currently, there is an expedition up the Tibetan side of Mount Everest. Soon there will be treks to the deepest portions of the world’s oceans.

These are not the wanderings of some adrenaline-crazed “extreme” tourist, but the itinerary of the Valentine portable electrocardiogram machine, created by Torrance-based Brentwood Medical Products.

The device is about the size of a VCR tape significantly smaller than the boxy electrocardiogram carts found in hospitals. It weighs less than a pound and runs on four AA batteries.

Each Valentine costs $2,590, vs. $8,000 for traditional EKG machines. That cost, along with its size and adaptability, makes the Valentine a low-cost, portable alternative to traditional EKGs.

“All we’ve really done is taken the smoke and mirrors out of an EKG machine,” said Michael Paquin, Brentwood’s vice president for sales and marketing. “Every machine that’s out there in a doctor’s office all have their own little computer and keyboard. We wanted to get away from that.”

It took five technicians at Brentwood about two years to develop a method to compress the size of the EKG. The resulting Valentine works without the built-in monitoring screen and roll of paper that full-size EKGs use to track the progress of the test.

The Valentine has 12 lead wires that are hooked up to a reclining patient to monitor heartbeat. The machine can then be connected to any computer that uses Windows so doctors are able to display the test results and determine if the patient is suffering a heart attack. The results also can be e-mailed or faxed anywhere for analysis.

Around 400 of the devices have been sold since they were introduced in 1997. And privately owned Brentwood, which had revenues last year of $3 million, is finalizing an arrangement with the U.S. Navy to include the Valentine on its nuclear submarine fleet.

Paquin cited several examples of its usefulness. Last year, a 46-year-old American engineer working on a remote construction site in the Takoradi River Valley started having persistent, dull chest pains. He went to the on-site medical trailer and asked the nurse practitioner for help.

Her first impulse was to evacuate the engineer via helicopter to the nearest hospital five hours away. The cost would have been at least $70,000 to handle a medical situation that had yet to be diagnosed as a heart attack.

Instead, the nurse hooked the man up to the Valentine and called Dr. Daniel Carlin, director of the Boston-based World Clinic, a “virtual emergency room” for health crises that occur overseas.

Judging from the engineer’s medical history, Carlin suspected he was at high risk of having a heart attack but needed to see the EKG results to be sure.

The nurse faxed the results to Boston via laptop computer. Within minutes, the diagnosis came through. The man was not having a heart attack.

“Until this case, no one had ever been evaluated or treated for such a critical problem with such completeness in a remote and difficult environment,” Carlin said.

Closer to home, the Valentine is seen by some as a money-saving device on the frontier of the “paperless” medical office. Dr. Mark Vaisman, a general practitioner at Community Medical Clinic in Studio City, said he bought the device because of its versatility.

“Everybody else wants to sell you the (EKG) software and the hardware,” he said. “This is just the software and we can still use our computer for other things.”

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