What Is Endovascular Surgery?

Today's quick video is about endovascular surgery, or endovascular therapy. In the simplest terms, it's keyhole surgery or minimally invasive surgery, and it involves making a small hole in either the artery or the vein. Through that, you deliver a sheath, and that allows us to put in wires, catheters, balloons, stents and all manner of different tools in order to treat the blood vessels from the inside.

In the case of an aneurysm, we can deliver a stent graft on the inside that then excludes the aneurysm from the circulation: a pipe within a pipe. If there's narrowing or blockages, we can use balloons to open things up and stents to keep them open. If there's a total blockage, we can use an endovascular drill to drill through and suck out the clot. We also have endovascular vacuum cleaners to suck out blood clots, such as deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary emboli.

Over the next few weeks, I'll be doing a series called Tools of the Trade, where I detail how each of these works, and I hope you'll stick around to see those too.