Concurrent balloon dilation of stenosed aortopulmonary Gore-Tex shunts and branch pulmonary arteries.

Cyanotic congenital heart defects (CCHD) with severe pulmonary stenosis or atresia exhibit hypoxemia and cyanosis secondary to pulmonary oligemia and right-to-left shunt. Even though a substantial proportion of these patients can be surgically corrected at presentation, such correction is not feasible in some patients either because of the age and size of the patient at presentation or because of anatomic complexity of the CCHD. In such patients, pulmonary blood flow may be augmented by creation of a systemic-topulmonary artery anastomosis; such palliative procedures improve hypoxemia and allow the infant to grow to an age and size when “corrective” surgery could be performed. Following the description by Blalock and Taussig (1) in 1945 of anastomosis of subclavian artery to the ipsilateral pulmonary artery, a number of other systemic-to-pulmonary artery shunt procedures, reviewed elsewhere (2), have been