At Austin Heart, our mission is to meet your need for exceptional cardiovascular care. The partnership between you, your primary care physician, your general cardiologist and our interventional cardiologists ensures the best care available.
Austin Heart's Interventional Cardiology Team is setting the standard in diagnosing and treating heart conditions such as valvular heart disease, congenital heart disease, coronary and vascular artery disease, and vein disease. Our interventional cardiology team performs approximately 3,000 interventions per year and offers the most advanced treatment options available, including:
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Leading Diagnostic procedures:
- Fractional flow reserve measurement
- Optical coherence tomography
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New Minimally Invasive Interventional Cardiology Techniques:
- Renal Denervation Therapy - a new treatment under investigation for patients with treatment resistant hypertension.
- Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement (TAVR) – a new treatment option for patients with severe aortic stenosis. Visit the Heart Hospital of Austin's site to learn more
Interventional Cardiology is a branch of cardiology that deals specifically with the catheter based treatment of structural heart diseases. Andreas Gruentzig is considered the father of interventional cardiology after the development of angioplasty by interventional radiologist, Dr. Charles Dotter.
A large number of procedures can be performed on the heart by catheterization. This most commonly involves the insertion of a sheath in to the femoral artery (but, in practice, any large peripheral artery or vein) and cannulating the heart under X-ray visualization (most commonly fluoroscopy). The radial artery may also be used for cannulation; this approach offers several advantages, including the accessibility of the artery in most patients, the easy control of bleeding even in anticoagulated patients, the enhancement of comfort because patients are capable of sitting up and walking immediately following the procedure, and the near absence of clinically significant sequelae in patients with a normal Allen test.