by
Kathy Mahdoubi, Senior Correspondent | March 04, 2010
Fluoroscopy remains one of the most essential tools in interventional radiology, in and out of the OR. "Fluoro is the key real-time image-guided procedure. As the physician is advancing a catheter - you are watching it in real time, and you can integrate that with CT or MR, and 3D representation," says Dewey.
Interdisciplinary turf wars
Ad Statistics
Times Displayed: 19605
Times Visited: 366 Stay up to date with the latest training to fix, troubleshoot, and maintain your critical care devices. GE HealthCare offers multiple training formats to empower teams and expand knowledge, saving you time and money
With so many departments and fields of expertise working in conjunction, overlaps and sometimes even tensions arise as specialists receive increasingly diversified training and as focus shifts from treating just one part of the anatomy to treating the entire patient.
A refurbished GE Innova 3100
installed by Transtate
Equipment Company
"There is a bit of a turf war going on between vascular surgeons and interventional radiologists, similar to what happened a couple years ago and what continues to happen with interventional cardiology doing more and more peripheral procedures," remarks Fabian. "Interventional cardiologists used to just work with a small field of view detector, concentrating on the coronaries and just the area right around the heart. A couple of years ago we saw the trend moving to using a larger field detector and working on what we term the peripherals - the renals and areas of the chest, from the carotids all the way down to the feet."
Dewey says turf wars are nothing new, and that they are a culture of the institution.
"Some institutions develop a competitive environment, and others have interventional radiologists standing shoulder to shoulder with a cardiac surgeon and they are collaborating."
Cementing a new procedure
One of the newer, and perhaps most controversial procedures in the cath angio lab right now is the vertebroplasty. During the procedure, an interventional neuroradiologist images the spine using a biplane X-ray system and then injects cement into the vertebral column with the objective of straightening and bolstering the spine.
"It's an interesting procedure, especially if you ever get to watch one," says Fabian. "It's usually an elderly patient whose back has some sort of curvature and they are just in excruciating pain."
