Coronary bifurcations as you have never seen them: The Visible Heart® Laboratory bifurcation programme

Abstract

The Visible Heart® Laboratory is an original experimental laboratory in which harvested animal hearts are resuscitated and connected to a support machine in order to beat outside the animal body. Resuscitated animal hearts may be exposed to various types of endovascular intervention under full, multimodality inspection. This unique experimental setting allows the performance of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in a setting which resembles a standard catheterisation laboratory set-up, and contemporaneously allows unique multimodality imaging. For these reasons, the performance of PCI on bifurcations in the Visible Heart® Laboratory may improve the knowledge of the dynamic stent deformations and stent-vessel wall interactions associated with the different steps of the various techniques for bifurcation stenting. Furthermore, the collected images may also serve as a novel educative resource for physicians. The performance of bifurcation stenting in the Visible Heart® Laboratory is a promising experimental setting to gain novel information regarding any existing or future PCI technique to treat coronary bifurcations.