Interventional Cardiology

During this procedure, your interventional cardiologist guides a catheter with a balloon to an artery that has become blocked or narrowed, often due to plaque buildup. Your physician inflates the balloon to clear the blockage and allow blood to flow freely. Once the balloon has cleared the blockage, a stent (a wire mesh tube) keeps the artery open long-term.

Your interventional cardiologist may use a drug-eluting stent, a special type of device that contains medications to reduce the risk of scar tissue forming around the stent.

In qualifying patients, interventional cardiologists can repair aortic stenosis, mitral valve regurgitation and other forms of heart valve disease using minimally invasive catheter-based approaches as an alternative to open-heart surgery. Procedures include:

• Transcatheter aortic valve replacement, a minimally invasive procedure used to replace a narrowed aortic valve.
• Transcatheter edge to edge repair (TEER), a solution for mitral valve regurgitation in which a small device is attached to the valve, allowing it to close properly.
• Valvuloplasty, in which a catheter equipped with a balloon is guided to a narrowed or blocked valve and inflated.

Ventricular assist devices (VADs) boost the heart’s ventricular (lower chambers) function in people with advanced heart failure. Although VADs often require open-heart surgery, percutaneous VADs (PVADs) can be implanted using catheters in the larger vessels of the leg or arm/chest.

If you have deep vein thrombosis or a pulmonary embolism, your interventional cardiologist may perform a percutaneous mechanical thrombectomy, in which a thin, flexible tube is used to help break up, dissolve or remove a blood clot.

Interventional cardiologists can use a procedure called cardiac ablation to treat damaged heart tissue caused by irregular heartbeats. It can also be used to treat heart conditions, such as cardiomyopathy, which can decrease blood flow out of your heart.

Your cardiologist may use:

• Radiofrequency energy: This approach uses heat to scar heart tissue and interrupt electrical signals.
• Cryotherapy: This approach works similarly to radiofrequency but uses very cold temperatures to create scarring.
• Alcohol: Alcohol causes damaged areas of the heart muscle to shrink, improving blood flow.