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Physician performing robotic angioplasty with CorPath Courtesy of Corindus
Catheter-based operations for valvular heart diseases, coronary stents and robotic systems in the field of oncosurgery are topics that will be discussed at the upcoming MEDICA 2014 trade fair's MEDICA EDUCATION CONFERENCE — the scientific and interdisciplinary advanced training event — on November 13th in Dusseldorf, Germany.
The main focus of the conference will be telemedicine and robotics. The discussions at the conference may include how treatment of a patient can be faster, more reliable and more cost-effective with new information technologies.
Among the events will be a plenary informational event — "Modern Surgery Robotics using the DLR Micro System by Way of Example," — a cardiology seminar — "Coronary Heart Disease-Always Just Catheters," — and an oncology discussion forum — "Robotics in Tumor Surgery."
In the field of cardiology, the most high-tech products are balloon catheters, coated and biologically degradable coronary stents, synthetic cardiac valves and robotic systems.
Catheter-based heart valve procedures have been the center of attention recently for patients with aortic stenosis. Transcatheter aortic valve implantation (TAVI) has been shown to be effective for high-risk patients who cannot undergo traditional surgery.
But now that there is a lot of work being done on new implants, and surgeons are getting more experience with the procedure, there is going to be a lot of advancement in diagnostic evaluation in the near future. There are already discussions about the procedure benefiting younger patients as well as patients with heart disease that is moderate or very low risk in the event of an operation.
Additionally, there are also discussions about whether catheter-based procedures could be a viable alternative to traditional surgery after failure of an organic prosthesis.
However, there are catheter-based procedures on the mitral valve that haven't received as much attention as TAVI due to the mitral valve's complex anatomy. Also, the data situation for those procedures for mitral regurgitation is less elaborate than TAVI.
Every second or third patient with severe symptomatic mitral regurgitation does not undergo an operation either because their left ventricular function is impaired, relevant concomitant disease, or advanced age. As a result, there are barely any therapies for a fairly large amount of patients with mitral valve insufficiency.
Many of the current studies focus on new stents with biodegradable polymers, polymer-free stents and completely bioresorbable stents.
