Heart Disease – Laser Treatment

Transcript

Our job as plumbers of the coronaries, are made difficult by types of lesions and the hardest lesions to treat are those that don’t yield very well, that are heavily calcified. We put a balloon in the artery and we inflate it and we go typically eight to 10 atmospheres. But some of these lesions, even at 20 atmospheres, don’t yield. The higher the atmospheres, the more risk to the patient in terms of rupture of the artery. And that’s a potentially lethal complication. So it’s really important for us to be able to stretch that artery comfortably without the risk of rupture. So we’ve developed different technologies, different balloons and rotational atherectomy, where we can basically do what they call the rotor rooter in the vessel. So stretching it open, breaking up the calcium to be able to deploy a stent, but we also have employed laser technology. So the excimer laser is actually a device that we can put in an artery that, let’s say has a stent that is not yielding and actually caused some pulverization of that material, such that the vessel and the stent could yield and accommodate and create a bigger lumen.