Tag Archive for: interventional cardiology

Thinking small for newborns with critical congenital heart disease

tiny stent illustration

Illustration of a hybrid stage I palliation with bilateral bands on the lung vessels and a stent in the ductus arteriosus for patients with small left heart structures.

A new LinkedIn post from Kurt Newman, M.D., president and CEO of Children’s National Hospital, tells a story about the hospital’s cardiac surgeons and interventional cardiologists working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to bring a better-sized, less-invasive vascular stent to the U.S. for the first time. The stent holds open a newborn’s ductus arteriosus, a key blood vessel that keeps blood flowing to the body, until the baby is big and strong enough to undergo a serious open-heart procedure for repair of hypoplastic left heart syndrome.

He writes, “Why is this important? At less than 6 lbs., these patients have arteries that are thinner than a toothpick – less than 2mm in diameter. Currently, the stent used in these children is an FDA approved device for adult vascular procedures, adapted and used off-label in children. It is not always well suited for the smallest babies as it is too large for insertion through the artery and often too long as well. The extra length can create immediate and long-term complications including obstructing the vessel it is supposed to keep open.

“While I am proud of the talent and dedication of our Children’s National cardiac surgery and interventional cardiology teams, I tell this story to illustrate a larger point – innovation in children’s medical devices matters. What’s unfortunate is that development and commercialization of pediatric medical devices in the U.S. continues to lag significantly behind adults…We can and must do better.”

Read Dr. Newman’s full post on LinkedIn.

Interventional cardiac magnetic resonance team welcomes new specialist

elena-grant-photo

The Interventional Cardiac Magnetic Resonance (ICMR) Program at Children’s National is actively developing newer and safer ways to perform cardiac procedures on young patients, with some of the world’s leading experts in cardiac catheterization and imaging. Elena Grant, M.D., a former pediatric cardiology fellow at Children’s National, is the newest member to join the team that pioneered real-time MRI-guided radiation-free cardiac catheterization for children.

In addition to clinical work as a Children’s National Interventional Cardiologist, Dr. Grant will perform preclinical research at the National Institutes of Health to develop new procedures, techniques, and devices that can be translated to clinical practice to treat children and adults with congenital heart disease.

Dr. Grant specializes in interventional cardiology. She received her medical degree from the University of Dundee Medical School in Dundee, Scotland, followed by Foundation Training in Edinburgh, Scotland. She completed her pediatric residency at Massachusetts General Hospital, her Pediatric Cardiology fellowship at Children’s National, and she recently finished an advanced fellowship in interventional pediatric cardiology at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory University.

Advances in interventional cardiovascular MRI

Children’s National is at the forefront of this exciting new field and is currently the only institution in the United States to perform radiation-free MRI-guided cardiac catheterization procedures in children.

ICMR is a partnership with the National Institutes of Health that brings together researchers, clinicians, engineers, and physicists to provide radiation-free, less invasive, and more precise diagnostics and treatment options for pediatric patients and adults with congenital heart disease.

The ICMR approach to heart catheterization uses real-time MRI, instead of X-ray, in pediatric research subjects undergoing medically necessary heart catheterization. This research study is intended as a step toward routine MRI-guided catheterization in children, which attempts to avoid the hazards of ionizing radiation (X-ray).

In 2015, after working with NIH to explore how interventional cardiovascular MRI could be integrated into pediatric practices, the ICMR team, including Dr. Grant, Russell Cross, M.D., Joshua Kanter, M.D., and Laura Olivieri, M.D., performed the first  radiation-free MRI-guided right heart catheterization on a 14-year-old girl at Children’s National. Since then, nearly 50 such procedures have been successfully completed, and the team is working to broaden the age range and cardiac disease complexity of patients who can undergo the procedure.

About 1 percent of newborns are born with a heart condition, and the team at Children’s performs more than 450 X-ray guided cardiac catheterizations and over 500 cardiac MRI scans per year.