The present invention relates to an electrode for a living body, which is suitably used as the electrode of a defibrillator, an electrocardiograph and the like.
Hitherto, in the case of carrying out the catheter-inspection of the heart, a catheter is inserted into a blood vessel of the patient and after introducing a contrast media into the heart via the blood vessel, X-ray photography is carried out.
Hereupon, there are cases where the patient is exited and causes cardiac convulsion for longer than 15 to 30 sec during the inspection. In the case where the cardiac convulsion continues for a long time, the stagnation of the blood occurs, thereby causing the damage of the cerebral cells, etc. Accordingly, a high voltage shock of 3000 to 5000 V is given to the heart of the patient while using a defibrillator ordinarily.
The conventional defibrillator has a shape of a box provided with a handle on the upper part thereof, and the electric shock is given by pressing the electrode part which is disposed on the lower surface of the box on the region of the heart of the patient.
However, in the case of using the conventional defibrillator, it is necessary to use the defibrillator after taking out it on each time when the cardiac convulsion is caused on the patient.
Namely, it is very much troublesome to use the conventional defibrillator and particularly, there is a fear of too late to meet an emergent requirement.
Moreover, there are cases where an electrode has been preliminarily adhered onto the surface of the body of the patient due to the necessity of taking electrocardiogram during X-ray photographing. However, since the conventional electrode is made of a metal and does not transmit X-ray, such an electrode has been an obstacle to the X-ray photography.
As a result of the present inventors' studies for solving the above-mentioned problems, it has been found that the whole electrode can be made to be transparent to X-ray by making the electrode substrate of the porous material mainly consisting of granular or fibrous carbon or of the flexible and porous material mainly consisting of fibrous carbon, and on the basis of the above-mentioned finding, the present inventors have attained the present invention.
Namely, the object of the present invention is to provide an electrode for a living body which has been constituted so that the whole electrode is transparent to X-ray and does not hinder the X-ray inspection by making the electrode substrate of the porous material composed of granular or fibrous carbon, or of the flexible and porous material composed of fibrous carbon.