William Ganz Passes Away

By Cole Petrochko, Staff Writer, MedPage Today Published: November 12, 2009

William Ganz, MD, co-inventor of the Swan-Ganz catheter for measuring blood flow and a pioneer in thrombolysis, died Tuesday of natural causes at age 90 in Los Angeles. "Dr. Ganz was a giant in medicine and in life," said Prediman Shah, MD, director of the Cardiology Division at the Cedar-Sinai Heart Institute. "He changed the lives of millions through his significant contributions to medicine, but he never lost sight of the importance of family and friends." In 1966, Ganz joined the fledgling cardiology division at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he and the then-Chief of Cardiology Jeremy Swan, MD, invented a balloon-tipped catheter to assess heart function in critically ill patients in 1970./.../