Dear Editor, Pulmonary artery catheter is widely used in cardiovascular surgical practice. Various complications of the Swan-Ganz catheter during insertion, its long-term placement, or removal are well known since its introduction.1-5 Herein, we report a case of the inadvertent fracture of an entrapped Swan-Ganz catheter during its attempted removal with moderate external traction. A 36-year-ol...

OBJECTIVES The purpose of the study was to examine survival in the implantable defibrillator subset of implanted leads at a large-volume implanting hospital. BACKGROUND Implantable lead survival has been the subject of many multicenter studies over the past decade. Fewer large implanting volume single-hospital studies have examined defibrillator lead failure as it relates to patient survival ...

c 2 a k o f d t 0 In 2004, a 68-year-old man received aortocoronary bypass surgery and a 23-mm Hancock porcine bioprosthesis (Medtronic, Minneapolis, Minnesota). Six years later, in January 2011, cardiac re-evaluation was performed due to progressive dyspnea. Invasive angiography showed open bypass grafts and severe stenosis of the porcine aortic bioprosthesis. Due to significant comorbidities,...

Severe haemolytic anaemia developed in a 33 year old patient after the mitral valve was replaced with a St Jude medical prosthesis. This was the patient's third thoracotomy. She had already had a mitral commissurotomy and a mitral valve bioprosthesis. The patient had an E+ antibody to red blood cells as well as a paraprosthetic leak. The haemolysis became less severe once the population of E+ r...

Objective The aim of this retrospective study was to evaluate the hemodynamic performance of the St. Jude Medical Trifecta (SJM Trifecta; St. Jude Medical, St Paul, Minnesota, United States) and the Carpentier-Edwards Perimount Magna Ease (CEPM Ease; Edwards Lifesciences, Irvine, California, United States) bioprostheses early postoperative and at 1 year. Methods From October 2007 to October 200...

BACKGROUND AND AIM OF THE STUDY An integrated macro/micro approach was used to evaluate flow within the pivots of the Medtronic ADVANTAGE bileaflet heart valve. Results were compared with those obtained with the St. Jude Medical bileaflet heart valve. METHODS The integrated macro/micro approach consists of both a macroscopic hydrodynamic performance assessment and a three-part microscopic flo...