Los Angeles: Doctors at the University of California Los Angeles have performed the world's first procedure to 'vacuum' a 24-inch blood clot out of a man's heart, which they feared could kill him instantly.
Sixty two-year-old Todd Dunlap, 62 underwent the procedure in California after a CT scan revealed the 24-inch clot stretching from his legs into his heart, which ran the risk of breaking loose and lodging in his lungs.
The minimally-invasive procedure, which used a device called AngioVac, was offered to Dunlap as an alternative to open-heart surgery and could be used more widely in future in medical science.
Dr John Moriarty in UCLA Medical Centre performed the non-invasive procedure to 'vacuum' the blood clot. Within a week of the procedure, Dunlap returned home to lead a normal life.
To perform the procedure, a team of radiologists and cardiovascular surgeons slid a tiny camera down the esophagus to visually monitor his heart before guiding a coiled hose though his neck artery to plug one end into his heart, against the potentially fatal clot.
They threaded the other end through a vein at the groin and hooked the hose up to a powerful heart-bypass device in the operating room to create suction.
'Once in place, the AngioVac quickly sucked the deadly clot out of the patient's heart and filtered out the solid tissue,' said Dr Moriarty.
'The system then restored the cleansed blood through a blood vessel near the groin, eliminating the need for a blood transfusion.'
The procedure lasted three hours.
