Preview
Description
The left side of the fourth shelf is a historical tribute to both the tools and pioneers for Interventional Cardiology. This is best described as a branch of medicine that uses thin, flexible catheters (tubes) instead of open surgery to diagnose and treat heart and blood vessel conditions. Interventional Cardiologists guide these small tubes through blood vessels from the wrist or leg to fix blocked arteries or damaged heart valves. The first grouping of artifacts on the 4th shelf are examples of Intra Coronary Artery Stents. They are displayed in their original packaging, three actual size stents are in the foreground and along the back wall, a model stent (magnified to 35 x the size of an implantable stent) is displayed showing the deployed lattice structure of these devices. Coronary Artery stents are typically only 2.0-5.0 mm in diameter and can be 8 mm to 48 mm in length.
A life-sized detailed heart model is shown in the center of this shelf. The cut away view of the right and left ventricles illustrate comparative heart muscle thickness and the 4 heart valves. The dissected surface features, of the right & left ventricles, appear to the right of the dissected heart. This part of the heart model shows the major coronary arteries (in red) and the coronary veins (in blue) upon this frontal surface.
Story boards for two major pioneers of Interventional Cardiology, Dr. Charles T. Dotter and Dr. Andreas Gruentzig are portrayed to the extreme right of the shelf. Dr. Dotter, a radiologist, was the first to describe the use of flow-directed balloon catheterization in blood vessels in 1964, while Dr. Gruentzig, working in Switzerland, was the first to perform coronary artery angioplasty (PTCA) in 1977. Two QR codes direct your cell phone to historical videos and animations of the land mark procedures, performed by these two medical pioneers.
Media Type
JPEG
Keywords
Museum of Medical History, special collections, image gallery, Gulf Coast Medical Center
