Diagnostics
Catheterization Procedures
Pediatric Heart Surgery
Catheterization lab (Cath lab) procedures
The cardiac cath lab at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin Herma Heart Center represents the best of today's medical imaging technology. One of the biggest benefits of this equipment is that it allows pediatric cardiologists to guide a catheter through a vein into the heart to take a closer look avoiding pediatric heart surgery (opening the chest.) Our pediatric cardiologists and pediatric cardiac anesthesiologists perform more than 450 cath lab procedures each year, including device closures for children's heart defects.
It is routine for us to not only diagnose heart problems, but repair them in the cath lab. Cath lab procedures may be performed to:
- Measure intracardiac (in the heart chambers) blood pressures and flow.
- Take pictures or angiograms of cardiac structures and vessels.
- Obtain cardiac tissue samples for biopsy.
- Create a hole in the heart in certain complex conditions to allow proper blood flow.
- Place mesh devices that close some holes inside the heart such as:
- Diagnose and correct abnormal cardiac rhythms through:
- Electrophysiology studies.
- Transvenous pacemakers.
- Cryoablation of abnormal electrical pathways.
- Place wire devices called stents in narrowed arteries to keep them open.
These heart procedures offer patients a quicker recover than open heart surgery. |
