Innovation and Improvisation - Wednesday August 11th

A busy day in the Dotter intervention rooms where I got to see two types of intervention that I had never seen before. I won't bore you all with the details but the cases, both performed by Fred Keller, nicely summed up the Dotter ethos.

Adrenal vein sampling is a notoriously fiddly procedure which requires insertion of catheters directly into the (tiny) veins which drain the adrenal glands. FK is an expert at this and, as previously described, shapes his own catheters over a boiling flask rather than using expensive pre-shaped catheters.

A selection of pre-shaped vascular catheters

Afterwards he performed a Balloon-occluded Retrograde Transvenous Obliteration (BRTO) - a rare and complex procedure for abnormal bleeding vessels in the stomach - something that I am unlikely to ever see again (until I'm asked to do one!)