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.

The FDA announced a class I recall of the Medtronic Hawk One directional atherectomy catheter system due to more than 160 reports of problems with the device’s guidewire. The catheter tip could break or separate when the guidewire prolapses, a problem that is associated with 55 injuries and no deaths, but the recall affects more than 95,000 units.

The impact of MRI procedures on medical devices has been the subject of regulatory concern for better than a decade, but the FDA needed until 2019 to craft a guidance that deals with testing and labeling for such considerations. The final guidance offers several tweaks and adjustments to the 2019 draft, but ignores several requests made by industry, including a request that the final not rely on a clinically relevant worst-case scenario when evaluating the potential for device heating.

The U.S. FDA draft guidance for select updates for premarket evaluation of class II atherectomy devices arrived with a lack of clarity that prompted device makers and clinicians alike to request the FDA address several sources of ambiguity. One of these is whether the agency should distinguish between particulate matter from the device vs. calcium particulates from the treated artery, while another is whether particulate evaluation is required only for devices with a coating.

Ra Medical Systems Inc., of Carlsbad, Calif., reported that the U.S. FDA has granted investigational device exemption (IDE) approval to study its DABRA excimer laser system as an atherectomy device to treat peripheral vascular stenosis.