Coronary Intervention & Surgery | March 2020

In just eight years, the world’s first completely robotic “hybrid” heart will be ready for transplant, according to the Daily Mail.

Three-year data from the BIOFLOW-V trial, presented Feb. 23 at the 2020 CRT Congress in National Harbor, Md., reinforce the status of Biotronik’s Orsiro drug-eluting stent as superior to the popular Xience stent.

Researchers on the EXCEL trial have been accused of withholding key mortality data when they first published results suggesting stents were as safe as open-heart surgery in treating patients with left main disease.

Philips is launching a new randomized controlled trial—dubbed DEFINE GPS—to assess patient outcomes after PCI guided by instant wave-Free Ratio measurements and angiograms. 

A review published in Circulation: Cardiovascular Interventions Jan. 24 suggests adjunctive coronary atherectomy is a clinically useful and effective tool for treating severely calcified coronary lesions—but, in reality, it’s rarely used.

Repeat revascularization isn’t a rare occurrence after PCI or CABG, according to a study of patients with left main coronary artery disease—but it can raise a person’s risk of cardiovascular death by as much as four times.

As many as 700 hearts from donors with hepatitis C are discarded each year in the U.S. New research suggests at least some of these organs may be suitable for transplant.