Interventional cardiology

Being diagnosed with heart disease can bring a lot of questions and concerns. One diagnostic and treatment option your doctor may recommend is interventional cardiology.

At Aurora Health Care, we have the expertise to treat serious heart conditions while developing the best course of treatment for you.

What is interventional cardiology?

Interventional cardiology is a way of diagnosing and treating heart disease with cardiac catheterization. In cardiac catheterization, our specialists use a catheter to view structures inside the body and make repairs, often without major surgery.

Interventional cardiology testing

We use the latest medical technologies to diagnose what’s wrong and how to help you feel better, including:

• 3-D and 4-D echocardiography imaging: These advanced technologies clearly visualize your heart to diagnose and treat heart and vascular conditions.
• Fractional flow reserve: This test gauges the pressure within a blood vessel on either side of a blockage.
• Optical coherence tomography: This imaging test takes high-resolution pictures of the inside of blood vessels, which helps your doctor know exactly where to place a stent.
• Hybrid catheterization labs: These operating rooms combine the best of interventional cardiology and cardiovascular surgery in one procedure.

Interventional cardiology treatments

Our interventional cardiology team is experienced at performing advanced procedures including:

• Alcohol septal ablation: This technique, used for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, treats thickened areas of the heart muscle with infusion of alcohol to shrink the muscle.
• Atrial septal defect closure: We offer minimally invasive closure of certain holes in the heart, including patent foramen ovale.
• Cardiac assist devices: Implantable devices such as pacemakers and defibrillators can help your heart’s pumping action.
• Angioplasty: This procedure unblocks or repairs your blood vessel and includes coronary angioplasty, peripheral angioplasty and coronary atherectomy.
• Stenting: Doctors insert these stents or tubes to hold your arteries open.
• Endovascular grafting: In this procedure to repair an aneurysm, we use a fabric tube inside your blood vessel.
• Cardiac catheterization: This procedure lets doctors know how well your heart is working.
• Induced hypothermia:This is sometimes used after surviving a sudden cardiac arrest.
• Myocardial biopsy: This provides valuable information about your health after a heart transplant or with some types of cardiomyopathy (enlarged heart).
• Transcatheter heart valve replacement (TAVR): In this minimally invasive procedure, your surgeon inserts a replacement aortic valve to the site of the damaged aortic valve using a catheter.

Placing your trust in our team

People from around eastern Wisconsin and northeastern Illinois choose our hospitals and clinics for our track record of safety and excellence. When you choose Aurora for your heart and vascular care, you can feel confident with our:

• National ranking: U.S. News & World Report consistently ranks our heart program among the best in the country. We’re dedicated to improving and transforming heart care.
  
• Experienced team: We perform thousands of coronary angioplasty procedures every year.
• Emergency heart care: We have doctors on-site 24/7 to clear blocked arteries fast, saving you valuable time during an emergency.
• Innovative research: We’re leaders in clinical trials and cardiovascular research to study new surgical approaches. We also study new devices to treat heart failure, arrhythmia and other types of heart disease.