Coronary Artery Disease
Nearly a half million people die annually from coronary artery disease, a condition in which the formation of plaque in the coronary arteries obstructs the supply of blood to the heart, making this the leading cause of death in the U.S. Despite various attempts to reduce risk factors, each year over one million patients undergo interventional procedures in an attempt to open blocked vessels and another a half million patients undergo open heart surgery to bypass blocked coronary arteries.
Treatment Options:
The Stereotaxis System can bring substantial benefit to the subset of complex interventional cardiology procedures, particularly those that include:
- Complex Lesions - Treatment of complex lesions is generally more problematic due to the difficulty in steering a wire through them. Because the magnetic navigation provides precise, computerized control of the working tip of a wire, it can enable physicians to more easily locate small openings in, and to advance a wire across, these lesions.
- Tortuous Anatomy - Some interventional procedures require physicians to navigate a wire through a series of very sharp turns in the patient's vasculature. Navigating through so-called "tortuous" anatomy using manual interventional techniques can be very time consuming and may be impossible. Precise magnetic navigation, along with computer-generated "roadmaps," can help physicians steer wires through these difficult winding blood vessels.
- Small Vessels - A number of medical studies report that diabetic patients usually comprise about 20 to 30% of U.S. hospital's interventional procedure volume. These patients generally have smaller vessels, making guidewire navigation extremely difficult. We believe that these patients can benefit significantly from the improved precise navigation enabled by the Stereotaxis system.
The most common procedure for unblocking the coronary arteries is commonly referred to as percutaneous coronary intervention or "PCI." A typical manual PCI procedure begins with the physician making a small incision into the patient's upper leg. A thin wire is inserted into a blood vessel and threaded up through the blocked area of the coronary artery. A delivery catheter that has a small balloon and a stent on its tip is slipped over the wire and positioned at blocked area. The balloon is inflated and the stent is expanded so it flattens the plaque against the artery wall and forms a scaffold to hold the artery open. .
Most PCI procedures are relatively simple and can be completed in 30 minutes or less. Approximately 15% of these procedures, however, involve difficult anatomy or disease and therefore require longer procedure times and may have sub-optimal outcomes.
Some patients who have very complex coronary artery disease or who have failed PCI may be treated with an open heart surgery called coronary artery bypass grafting or "CABG." In CABG procedures, a blood vessel is harvested from another area of the body (usually the leg) and is surgically sewn into the diseased coronary artery to effectively bypass the clogged vessel. This usually required a large surgical incision where the breastbone is intentionally fractured in order to access the heart.For more information and additional resources, click here.
