A pioneering paper was presented at last week’s meeting, in Washington, DC of the Society of Interventional Radiology by Dr John Moriarty, Specialist Registrar in Dublin’s Mater Hospital. His colleague Dr Leo Lawler was the lead author of the paper. The Mater is the only place in the country and one of a few places in Europe that is doing a particular type of stenting for adults with congenital heart disease.
Instead of open heart surgery, certain patients now get a pulmonary valve put in via stenting. This procedure, which is not yet licensed in the United States, was examined with CT during Dr Moriarty’s presentation.
The paper, ‘Percutaneous Pulmonary Stent-Valve Insertion Based on 3D DSCTA: Evaluation of the Right Ventricular Outflow Tract’, was presented at the annual meeting in Washngton DC. It deals with using the most modern type of non-invasive CT scanning, dual-source CT, to evaluate complex congenital heart disease prior to the insertion of these stent valves. The stents are put in by cardiologists, including the co-authors of the paper, Dr Kevin Walsh, also from the Mater Hospital, and Dr Colin MacMahon, from Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin.
Moving beyond diagnosis and into therapy, interventional radiologists have new imaging techniques and new ways of getting into organs which, when combined, give an extremely powerful new tool that is changing the course of care for patients, in quality as well as quantity of life.
About Gary Culliton
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