Atherectomy devices play a key role in dealing with calcified coronary arteries. But a study presented at this year’s Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics demonstrates that angioplasty balloons made a lot of headway in this clinical area, potentially pushing atherectomy devices into the fringes of routine practice.
Boston Scientific Corp. is hoping to help change European guidelines on the use of intravascular imaging during percutaneous coronary intervention procedures, Emile Mehanna, medical affairs and medical education director, interventional cardiology, EMEA, told BioWorld.
Intravascular ultrasound is the preferred imaging modality for a number of procedures conducted on the circulatory system, including some procedures performed in the peripheral vasculature, but adoption is seen in some quarters as sub-optimal. A trio of medical journals have published a consensus statement pressing the case for more widespread utilization of IVUS for peripheral artery disease, but one of the sources of drag is poor Medicare reimbursement, a problem that might only be resolved in a piecemeal fashion.
No matter how you look at it, guiding percutaneous coronary interventions to treat complex lesions with optical coherence tomography (OCT) or intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) produces similar results in patients with complex lesions, a study presented Oct. 23 at the Transcatheter Cardiovascular Therapeutics (TCT) annual meeting in San Francisco indicated.
Sonoscape Medical Corp. obtained marketing approval in China for its intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) diagnostic device and intravascular ultrasound diagnostic catheter.
