Intermountain Healthcare became the first in Utah to perform a new lifesaving heart procedure, Deseret News reported Oct. 27.
The procedure, called a thoracic branch endoprosthesis, allows surgeons to repair heart vessels without open-heart surgery. Surgeons feed a stent grant through blood vessels in the leg with minimal cuts required.
"We're coming through someone's leg with small puncture sites, and the graft covers just the area where it's torn and diseased. And we don't have to make any cuts. We don't have to take out part of the aorta. We don't have to potentially interrupt blood flow to the brain or the arm," John Doty, MD, a cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon at Intermountain, said in the report.
This procedure reduces recovery time from a few weeks to a couple of days.