Cath Lab Live

Interactive live case offers providers a chance to learn about transcatheter PDA closures in infants

More than 100 providers experienced a live transcatheter patent ductus arteriosus closure recently at Le Bonheur’s inaugural International PDA Symposium in Memphis.

The crowd watched while Le Bonheur Interventional Cardiologist Shyam Sathanandam, MD, FSCAI, performed the closure on a 700-gram, 14-day-old (24-week gestation) premature newborn. As Shyam and his team closed the PDA in the hospital’s catheterization lab, attendees gathered fewer than five miles away at the conference headquarters were able to ask questions about technique and the procedure.

Panelists and operators provided narration and led conversation through the closure. During the procedure, Shyam and his team initially used one device, but later had to retrieve and insert a different one after the first attempt was unsuccessful.

“We were able to demonstrate successful closure of the PDA, successful retrieval of a device out of the PDA, and demonstrated that complications can happen, but we are prepared to overcome it successfully even in such a tiny patient,” said Shyam, medical director of Interventional Cardiac Imaging & Interventional Catheterization Laboratory. “The patient did remarkably well after the procedure. She came off the breathing machine in seven days and is now on full oral feeds, growing well.”

Shyam pioneered the procedure in the past three years in Le Bonheur’s catheterization lab for extremely low birth weight (ELBW) premature infants. His work drew attendees from all over the United States and three countries to learn more about the minimally invasive procedure.

The closure, which involves no incisions, allows for PDA closures via a catheter in ELBW, premature infants – 48 of whom weighed less than 1 kilogram. Shyam and his team are part of a 10-site, FDA-approved clinical trial for the device used in the closure. Shyam performed the first procedure in all of the United States on a 1 kilogram patient on the trial and has performed the most number of such procedures in the country to date.

The procedure takes less than 30 minutes to perform, and recovery times are less than six hours to return to baseline ventilator settings.