New devices lead the way in PAD treatment

Deborah’s Endovascular Medicine Department is once again on the cutting edge of technology, offering two new state-of-the-art devices for patients with peripheral arterial disease (PAD). This crippling condition affects the arteries of the pelvis and legs, including causing blockages in the femoral or popliteal arteries.

The SilverHawk Plaque Excision System is inserted with a catheter and uses a tiny rotating blade to shave away plaque from inside arteries. The plaque is collected in the nose cone of the device. The Outback Re-Entry Catheter uses a guide wire that can cross lesions that are completely blocked, creating a channel across the blockage.

“For people handicapped by the pain of walking or facing limb amputation, the SilverHawk System can offer a new outlook on life,” says Manu Rajachandran, M.D., chairman, Department of Endovascular Medicine. “Likewise, the Outback Re-Entry Catheter provides an excellent minimally invasive alternative to surgery.”

DEBORAH doctors introduce innovative procedures

Not once, but twice, Deborah doctors debuted brand-new, cutting-edge technologies at the hospital. In recent back-to-back procedures, Christine Gasperetti, M.D., William Anderson, M.D., Se Do Cha, M.D., Gabor Winkler, M.D., and Arthur Ng, M.D., have put Deborah in the center of a wave of new advances.

Dr. Gasperetti, assisted by Drs. Anderson and Cha, performed a TandemHeart procedure, making Deborah the only hospital in the state using this technique. TandemHeart, a device that sits on a patient’s thigh and is wired through a catheter, acts like a second heart during angioplasty. TandemHeart pumps about 85 percent of the patient’s blood, cutting patient risk and offering options for those too sick to undergo surgery and other treatments.

In another first, Drs. Winkler and Ng performed an endovascular thoracic aneurysm repair with a stent graft, making Deborah the only facility in South Jersey—and only the third in the Delaware Valley—to do this procedure. Instead of a traditional thoracic repair requiring major surgery, the two doctors used a catheter to feed a special plastic-coated stent to the aneurysm. This procedure circumvented partial bypass, an incision to the chest cavity and significant patient recovery time.

Both new procedures promise to become part of Deborah’s full arsenal of tools providing patients with the least invasive but most effective approaches to surgical healthcare. These techniques will allow sicker patients better treatment options while cutting inpatient and recovery times.

The TandemHeart device makes treatment possible for high-risk patients.