Dr. LeSar and the Vascular Insitute of Chattanooga invite us for a behind the scenes view of technology that improves quality of life.
CHATTANOOGA, TN – The Vascular Institute of Chattanooga invited us into the outpatient room for a look at some tech that’s changing lives here in the Tennessee Valley. Dr. Chris LeSar is one of the top vascular surgeons in the world and his friends at Asahi Inntech took us behind the curtain to showcase some of their new technology that had never been used in Chattanooga and potentially this hemisphere.
Asahi Inntec USA is part of a global company that make cutting interventional guide wires and microcatheters, and has been working with surgeons like Dr. Lesar all over the globe. Vascular institute was selected because of their reputation to be first in line for their new device.
The surgery you’re watching – and don’t worry folks there’s no need to turn away there is nothing graphic here – is a Chattanooga resident that’s had issues with balance, loss of mobility and feeling in the leg. Dr. LeSar and his team identified a blood clot as the issue.
What you’re seeing is Dr. LeSar using an Asahi Inntech 0.46mm crosslead penetration wire. You can see in the video where he breaks thru the clot to restore circulation.
Once the clot is broken thru you’re probably wondering what happens to all those extra pieces of the clot. Well, Dr. LeSar runs a laser wire into the effected area.
“This is a laser that’s is not like Star Wars where it shoots out a laser beam and it zaps something far away it actually only interacts at 1 mm from the edge,” says Dr. LeSar.
This process is called photo oblation and it breaks up the small particles into small enough pieces basically down to a molecular level so that they can flow back thru the body naturally without causing any issues.
From there he goes in to add a stint. We’ve all heard of stints being used in various surgeries but the interesting thing about this stint was that is uses body heat to reach a specified diameter. Much like the heat shrink tubing many of us have used in home and automotive applications, this stint works that same way but it expands under body heat instead of contracting. So you can see the blood flow open up and restore to her lower extremities and the stint will help the vein from reverting to its previous state.
To see if the surgery was a success he injected some colored dye and the patient started regaining feeling and blood flow to her leg. But the technology in vascular care has made leaps and bounds over the last 15 years.
According to Dr. LeSar “The technology has advanced dramatically, when I was a young doctor many years ago I was interested in the circulation system and how that worked and when we did surgeries for patients they were always open surgeries we had to open the body go inside and physically fix something repair something do a bypass around something. Now we can treat the most all the arteries and veins from inside. We call it endovascular inside the vascular system and a lot of the procedures we do now, I’ll say it this way I was never trained to do in my surgical residency. We had to train and learn this over time using learning the technology working with companies to help us get better at what we do.”
Again, this is technology no other vascular surgeon in town has access to at the moment. This particular patient walked out of the office under her own power about an hour and a half later with her pain having subsided and her balance issues stayed in the operating room.
This post was originally published on here
