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Aortoiliac Aneurysm | EVAR (Chimney Graft) | 69 | Male
Aortoiliac Aneurysm | EVAR (Chimney Graft) | 69 | Male
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So, here's a case, it's a 69 year old, hypertension, dyslipidemic, coronary disease. 40 years back in history it sounds like every one of our aneurysm

patients has a pulsatile that was discovered incidentally on a physical exam and CT scan shows this complex aortoiliac aneurysm. So the the aneurysm at the aorta is not that big. It's barely five centimeters. But here's the real issue.

The common iliacs measure about three centimeters on the right, and over four centimeters on the left. This is what that angiogram looked like. So here's our dilemma, it's how to repair this type of aneurysms. We've already alluded to the chimney repairs.

So I just talk a little bit just in terms of establishing a definition. Chimney refers to placement of a stent or stent-graft parallel to the main aortic stent-graft in order to extend the proximal or distal sealing zone and maintain side branch patency. Advantages, obviously is that in this case you're utilizing just standard off-the-shelf devices which are a lot less expensive than a fenestrated device

for instance or a custom-made device, and it also conforms to wider variety of anatomy compared to some of the custom devices. Disadvantages, you're worried about that side branch potency and you're also worried about gutter type endoleaks. So in terms of definitions real quick,

a chimney is a parallel graft that points down and receives flowt from above such as illustrated here in this renals. "Snorkel" is a term used interchangeably. The periscope points up and receives flow from below. Where that's commonly employed, as in this case here, when you're

trying to preserve celiac and SMA potency while extending the distal sealing zone of a thoracal abdominal repair. Sandwich actually refers to a conduit that's interposed between two other bodies or extensions. And so the gutters are those zones of sub-optimal confirmation which introduce the potential for type one endoleaks.

And this is the idea behind this repair. We're gonna embolize unilaterally the initial iliac, the uglier and larger aneurysm on the left and we're gonna do a parallel chimney technique on the right. And so this is about of a couple of technical

pointers that embolization we are all very familiar with, we wanna try to get the proximal internal iliac before the bifurcation if at all possible and the AVP2 worked really well in this circumstance. And getting to the repair when it was first described, it did talk about a bachial artery approach which would be necessary if you're

using a standard, modular, bifurcated endograft. But with the Endologix repair, as is gonna be demonstrated here, again you've got that aortic bifurcation preserved. So place the main body as well as the cuff of the Endologix first and you can get up and over that bifurcation pretty easily without any kind of special snare techniques.

In this case we're using a 9 French sheath cause we're using an 8 millimeter Viabahn over a stiff guide wire. In terms of just some technical pointers, if at all possibly you wanna get that sheath well down into the hypogastric so that when the Viabahn is deployed and then you're going up with the iliac extension limb you're not gonna rough up the Viabahn

or push up the Viabahn. So you place the Viabahn first, you protect that Viabahn with the 9 French sheath as you deploy the extension. And then as far as the timing of the unsheathing of the Viabahn or the unsheathing of the external iliac limb,

you can do it in any order. You just wanna make sure at the top end, the Viabahn reaches at least as high as the iliac extension limb on this side. Any other tips and tricks about using this technique? >> Again, I sometimes use a deflecting sheath, the one that you showed

earlier, which helps in these scenarios if you wanna use the iCAST instead of Viabahn. Or if the internal is small you'll get a way with seven, eight Viabahn will go through,

eight French sheath etc. So we choose the material and the grafts we're gonna use depending on the specific case, but essentially, exactly what you're doing. >> [INAUDIBLE]

>> Yes. >> [CROSSTALK] >> But beyond the stent is that you can actually get by with a lot lower profile sheath to get up and over with the atrium, and sometimes it's very difficult to deliver this 9 French sheath.

And if you're using a 10 millimeter Viabahn then you're talking about 11 French sheath, which is really hard without an up and over snare tech. >> The disadvantage of iCAST as a balloon expandable, it's more

rigid etc. So you don't use it in a very torturous, if the internal is taking a turn right away, I wouldn't use it. But if it's a straight 2, 3 millimeter segment,

The advantage is you can actually use one iCAST 59, and you can balloon the internal to whatever diameter you want. You can balloon the seals on up to 13, or 14. You can get a complete seal with one size and by different balloon

dilation on different segments of the iCAST. > Do you about competition with the external iliac limb? Because the atrium presumably has lot more- >> Most of the cases that we do, these are aneurysmal common iliacs. Anyways, there's enough space on most of them,

but obviously there's an important factor to look into. >> I had a case of that. The external, the limb that went through the external, the Endologix limb occluded basically by the, and it was a Viabahn not an iCAST. So it could happen and I think

the Endologix limbs don't have the best radial force, their design is different, their endoskeleton. So maybe with that maybe putting a Gore limb, like something similar to the Viabahn.

The incompatible material rather than different material maybe better. >> I like using the Endologix with the Viabahn. We get the flaring of the [INAUDIBLE] >> Yes.

I agree with you. But we had a case of occlusion, I don't know it's maybe anecdotal sizing issue but it can happen. >> Yeah. I've heard of it happening several times.

So, anyway this was a follow up CT. [INAUDIBLE] So at three years now there is a preservation of patency in this hypogastric. Just an interesting technique that I saw described which allows you to use a conventional bifurcated endograft is this crossover chimney technique in which they actually placed

a parallel stent graft that begins as a periscope and ends as a chimney. Which is kind of almost like a fem-fem bypass in order to preserve internal iliac patency. There's this trifurcated endograft technique which is basically placing a bifurcated endograft within another bifurcated endograft

for preservation of inter iliac flow. And that's kinda the precursor to this dedicated iliac branch device which was approved earlier this year from Gore, which just looks like a mini bifurcated endograft that's placed along with the bridging stent to get a conformation like this.

And this internal iliac limb is precannulated with a wire. It is an expensive option. And this is basically, real briefly the technique is this. This wire that's precannulated into the internal iliac limb is snared from the contralateral approach that gives you this through-and-through

wire that allows you to advance a 12 French sheath up and over. And then a third guide wire is utilized to cannulate the internal iliac limb and deploy the internal iliac branch and then finally the main body is delivered through an 18 french sheath from the left with a bridging limb. So, the problem with this device is that it's actually gonna be very restricted

in terms of the type of anatomy that's gonna be conducive to this approach. One study shows that maybe about half of the patients are not gonna be eligible for a device like this. Cook is addressing this with a number of different designs that are yet to be approved.

So, just wanna finish the advantages of the chimney technique that we discussed include, preservation of internal iliac artery flow. There's less common iliac artery dilatations so less proximal graft migration which was discussed

as well as decreased Type 1a endoleak, or Type 1B endoleak actually. No restrictions in regards to the common iliac artery diameter or length, or very little restrictions in terms of diameter. And it has a lot lower cost option than this illiac branch device that's now available.

So, thanks.

- Thank you. Thank you again for the invitation, and also my talk concerns the use of new Terumo Aortic stent graft for the arch. And it's the experience of three different countries in Europe. There's no disclosure for this topic.

Just to remind what we have seen, that there is some complication after surgery, with mortality and the stroke rate relatively high. So we try to find some solution. We have seen that we have different options, it could be debranching, but also

we know that there are some complications with this technique, with the type A aortic dissection by retrograde way. And also there's a way popular now, frozen elephant trunk. And you can see on the slide the principle.

But all the patients are not fit for this type of surgery. So different techniques have been developed for endovascular options. And we have seen before the principle of Terumo arch branch endograft.

One of the main advantages is a large window to put the branches in the different carotid and brachiocephalic trunk. And one of the benefit is small, so off-the-shelf technique, with one size for the branch and different size

for the different carotids. This is a more recent experience, it's concerning 15 patients. And you can see the right column that it is. All the patients was considered unfit for conventional surgery.

If we look about more into these for indication, we can see four cases was for zone one, seven cases for zone two, and also four cases for zone three. You can see that the diameter of the ascending aorta, the min is 38,

and for the innominate artery was 15, and then for left carotid was eight. This is one example of what we can obtain with this type of handling of the arch with a complete exclusion of the lesion, and we exclude the left sonography by plyf.

This is another, more complex lesion. It's actually a dissection and the placement of a stent graft in this area. So what are the outcomes of patients? We don't have mortality, one case of hospital mortality.

We don't have any, sorry, we have one stroke, and we can see the different deaths during the follow-up. If we look about the endoleaks, we have one case of type three endoleak started by endovascular technique,

and we have late endoleaks with type one endoleaks. In this situation, it could be very difficult to treat the patient. This is the example of what we can observe at six months with no endoleak and with complete exclusion of the lesion.

But we have seen at one year with some proximal type one endoleak. In this situation, it could be very difficult to exclude this lesion. We cannot propose this for this patient for conventional surgery, so we tried

to find some option. First of all, we tried to fix the other prosthesis to the aortic wall by adjusted technique with a screw, and we can see the fixation of the graft. And later, we go through the,

an arrangement inside the sac, and we put a lot of colors inside so we can see the final results with complete exclusion. So to conclude, I think that this technique is very useful and we can have good success with this option, and there's a very low

rate of disabling stroke and endoleaks. But, of course, we need more information, more data. Thank you very much for your attention.

- Thank you very much. These are my disclosures. So, infected aorta, in terms of the primary infected aorta and secondary infected stent grafts is a difficult problem, and its instance is probably increasing the more we treat. These patients present late, they're often very malnourished,

and they have significant comorbidity. One place where endovascular therapy is definitely effective is in the emergency situation, both the primary infected aortas, like this case on the right hand side, and also for primary aorto-enteric fistula in an emergency.

This is a young man who had obesity surgery and leaked from his gastric anastomosis. He had an esophageal stent, which then caused a significant infection in the mediastinum and eroded through his aorta. He came in in extremis bleeding

and a short stent to cover that saves his life and gives you an opportunity for later on. It's also effective in secondary infections. This is a young lady who had an aortobifemoral bypass, who is bleeding in the retroperitoneum, and you can cover that with a stent graft

and think about further treatment later. Certainly in the short term, endovascular results from treating primary mycotic aneurysms are good. Our series on the left hand side, we had only one death in our endovascular group. In further case series and in systematic reviews,

the 30 day mortality is consistently somewhere between 10% and 15% in the early stage. Long term results from primary mycotic aneurysm treatment are not that bad. This is the biggest paper, I think, in circulation, showing the three, four, five year results

which are acceptable, but you have to remember that success was gained in this group. In those without persistent sepsis, in those without aortoenteric fistula, and probably in some bacterial types, particularly salmonella, which can be treated

well before the endograft is implanted. The secondary graft infection we have to remember, though, has a significant early mortality. This is our series from Imperial, our open graft excision surgery, for urgent and emergency cases included, is 25%,

but for that you swap an excellent five year mortality. Only a few patients die in that long period. If you're putting an endograft in for secondary graft infection and aortoenteric fistula, we can look to this systematic review which I was good to join in with Steve Kakkos.

The results for endovascular treatment are poor. The rate of current sepsis at two years is 42% in the endovascular group, far worse than that for excisional surgery, so they don't do well. I've got significant concerns for endovascular treatment, and we need to worry about these if we're going to put

endovascular grafts in and leave them in. The first is of antimicrobial resistance, there are more and more resistant bugs occurring in our practice, and it's certainly been our practice in our series. Over the last three years, the number of patients with resistant bugs is up to about 50%.

This is a young man who had infective endocarditis with a fungal disease, a multi-resistant fungus. This is the state of his aorta in the top left hand panel. Of course he needs a deep venous reconstruction, which we then cover with Omentum, and he did well after that.

For aortoenteric fistula, if you're going to put an endograft in, in our experience, these get reinfected and rupture, and they probably do need definitive treatment. In secondary graft infection, aortoenteric fistula, remember, is present in 1/3 of patients,

and you need to consider this. You're only going to find that at surgery if you're placing a stent graft in. Again, we discussed earlier in this session, further interventions: graft infection

is more commonly associated with multiple interventions, and it provides a further nidus for infection. So, when is endovascular therapy effective? Well, endovascular treatments in the emergency cases are life-saving and I think they are effective. For primary aortic infection, it's effective

when there is clearance of sepsis, a low -virulence microorganism, and no fistula. Then, the results are acceptable. For secondary cases treated with Endo techniques, the long term recurrence of sepsis is significant, and they really need definitive graft excision,

or you need to accept they have antibiotics and accept palliation. Thank you very much.

- Thank you for the opportunity to present this arch device. This is a two module arch device. The main model comes from the innominated to the descending thoracic aorta and has a large fenestration for the ascending model that is fixed with hooks and three centimeters overlapping with the main one.

The beginning fenestration for the left carotid artery was projected but was abandoned for technical issue. The delivery system is precurved, preshaped and this allows an easy positioning of the graft that runs on a through-and-through wire from the

brachial to the femoral axis and you see here how the graft, the main model is deployed with the blood that supported the supraortic vessels. The ascending model is deployed after under rapid pacing.

And this is the compilation angiogram. This is a case from our experience is 6.6 centimeters arch and descending aneurysm. This is the planning we had with the Gore Tag. at the bottom of the implantation and these are the measures.

The plan was a two-stage procedure. First the hemiarch the branching, and then the endovascular procedure. Here the main measure for the graph, the BCT origin, 21 millimeters, the BCT bifurcation, 20 millimeters,

length, 30 millimeters, and the distal landing zone was 35 millimeters. And these are the measures that we choose, because this is supposed to be an off-the-shelf device. Then the measure for the ascending, distal ascending, 35 millimeters,

proximal ascending, 36, length of the outer curve of 9 centimeters, on the inner curve of 5 centimeters, and the ascending model is precurved and we choose a length between the two I cited before. This is the implantation of the graft you see,

the graft in the BCT. Here, the angiography to visualize the bifurcation of the BCT, and the release of the first part of the graft in the BCT. Then the angiography to check the position. And the release of the graft by pushing the graft

to well open the fenestration for the ascending and the ascending model that is released under cardiac pacing. After the orientation of the beat marker. And finally, a kissing angioplasty and this is the completion and geography.

Generally we perform a percutaneous access at auxiliary level and we close it with a progolide checking the closure with sheet that comes from the groin to verify the good occlusion of the auxiliary artery. And this is the completion, the CT post-operative.

Okay. Seven arch aneurysm patients. These are the co-morbidities. We had only one minor stroke in the only patient we treated with the fenestration for the left carotid and symptomology regressed completely.

In the global study, we had 46 implantations, 37 single branch device in the BCT, 18 in the first in men, 19 compassionate. These are the co-morbidities and indications for treatment. All the procedures were successful.

All the patients survived the procedure. 10 patients had a periscope performed to perfuse the left auxiliary artery after a carotid to subclavian bypass instead of a hemiarch, the branching. The mean follow up for 25 patients is now 12 months.

Good technical success and patency. We had two cases of aneurysmal growth and nine re-interventions, mainly for type II and the leak for the LSA and from gutters. The capilomiar shows a survival of 88% at three years.

There were three non-disabling stroke and one major stroke during follow up, and three patients died for unrelated reasons. The re-intervention were mainly due to endo leak, so the first experience was quite good in our experience and thanks a lot.

- Thank you very much and thank you Dr. Veith for the kind invite. Here's my disclosures, clearly relevant to this talk. So we know that after EVAR, it's around the 20% aortic complication rate after five years in treating type one and three Endoleaks prevents subsequent

secondary aortic rupture. Surveillance after EVAR is therefore mandatory. But it's possible that device-specific outcomes and surveillance protocols may improve the durability of EVAR over time. You're all familiar with this graph for 15 year results

in terms of re-intervention from the EVAR-1 trials. Whether you look at all cause and all re-interventions or life threatening re-interventions, at any time point, EVAR fares worse than open repair. But we know that the risk of re-intervention is different

in different patients. And if you combine pre-operative risk factors in terms of demographics and morphology, things are happening during the operations such as the use of adjuncts,

or having to treat intro-operative endoleak, and what happens to the aortic sac post-operatively, you can come up with a risk-prediction tool for how patients fare in the longer term. So the LEAR model was developed on the Engage Registry and validated on some post-market registries,

PAS, IDE, and the trials in France. And this gives a predictive risk model. Essentially, this combines patients into a low risk group that would have standard surveillance, and a higher risk group, that would have a surveillance plus

or enhanced surveillanced model. And you get individual patient-specific risk profiles. This is a patient with around a seven centimeter aneurysm at the time of repair that shows sac shrinkage over the first year and a half, post-operatively. And you can see that there's really a very low risk

of re-intervention out to five years. These little arrow bars up here. For a patient that has good pre-operative morphology and whose aneurysm shrinks out to a year, they're going to have a very low risk of re-intervention. This patient, conversely, had a smaller aneurysm,

but it grew from the time of the operation, and out to two and a half years, it's about a centimeter increase in the sac. And they're going to have a much higher risk of re-intervention and probably don't need the same level of surveillance as the first patient.

and probably need a much higher rate of surveillance. So not only can we have individualized predictors of risk for patients, but this is the regulatory aspect to it as well.

Multiple scenario testing can be undertaken. And these are improved not only with the pre-operative data, but as you've seen with one-year data, and this can tie in with IFU development and also for advising policy such as NICE, which you'll have heard a lot about during the conference.

So this is just one example. If you take a patient with a sixty-five millimeter aneurysm, eighteen millimeter iliac, and the suprarenal angle at sixty degrees. If you breach two or more of these factors in red, we have the pre-operative prediction.

Around 20% of cases will be in the high risk group. The high risk patients have about a 50-55% freedom from device for related problems at five years. And the low risk group, so if you don't breach those groups, 75% chance of freedom from intervention.

In the green, if you then add in a stent at one year, you can see that still around 20% of patients remain in the high risk group. But in the low risk group, you now have 85% of patients won't need a re-intervention at five years,

and less of a movement in the high risk group. So this can clearly inform IFU. And here you see the Kaplan-Meier curves, those same groups based pre-operatively, and at one year. In conclusion, LEAR can provide

a device specific estimation of EVAR outcome out to five years. It can be based on pre-operative variables alone by one year. Duplex surveillance helps predict risk. It's clearly of regulatory interest in the outcomes of EVAR.

And an E-portal is being developed for dissemination. Thank you very much.

- The only disclosure is the device I'm about to talk to you about this morning, is investigation in the United States. What we can say about Arch Branch Technology is it is not novel or particularly new. Hundreds of these procedures have been performed worldwide, most of the experiences have been dominated by a cook device

and the Terumo-Aortic formerly known as Bolton Medical devices. There is mattering of other experience through Medtronic and Gore devices. As of July of 2018 over 340 device implants have been performed,

and this series has been dominated by the dual branch device but actually three branch constructions have been performed in 25 cases. For the Terumo-Aortic Arch Branch device the experience is slightly less but still significant over 160 device implants have been performed as of November of this year.

A small number of single branch and large majority of 150 cases of the double branch repairs and only two cases of the three branch repairs both of them, I will discuss today and I performed. The Aortic 3-branch Arch Devices is based on the relay MBS platform with two antegrade branches and

a third retrograde branch which is not illustrated here, pointing downwards towards descending thoracic Aorta. The first case is a 59 year old intensivist who presented to me in 2009 with uncomplicated type B aortic dissection. This was being medically managed until 2014 when he sustained a second dissection at this time.

An acute ruptured type A dissection and sustaining emergent repair with an ascending graft. Serial imaging shortly thereafter demonstrated a very rapid growth of the Distal arch to 5.7 cm. This is side by side comparison of the pre type A dissection and the post type A repair dissection.

What you can see is the enlargement of the distal arch and especially the complex septal anatomy that has transformed as initial type B dissection after the type A repair. So, under FDA Compassion Use provision, as well as other other regulatory conditions

that had to be met. A Terumo or formerly Bolton, Aortic 3-branch Arch Branch device was constructed and in December 2014 this was performed. As you can see in this illustration, the two antegrade branches and a third branch

pointing this way for the for the left subclavian artery. And this is the images, the pre-deployment, post-deployment, and the three branches being inserted. At the one month follow up you can see the three arch branches widely patent and complete thrombosis of the

proximal dissection. Approximately a year later he presented with some symptoms of mild claudication and significant left and right arm gradient. What we noted on the CT Angiogram was there was a kink in the participially

supported segment of the mid portion of this 3-branch graft. There was also progressive enlargement of the distal thoracoabdominal segment. Our plan was to perform the, to repair the proximal segment with a custom made cuff as well as repair the thoracoabdominal segment

with this cook CMD thoracoabdominal device. As a 4 year follow up he's working full time. He's arm pressures are symmetric. Serum creatinine is normal. Complete false lumen thrombosis. All arch branches patent.

The second case I'll go over really quickly. 68 year old man, again with acute type A dissection. 6.1 cm aortic arch. Initial plan was a left carotid-subclavian bypass with a TEVAR using a chimney technique. We changed that plan to employ a 3-branch branch repair.

Can you advance this? And you can see this photo. In this particular case because the pre-operative left carotid-subclavian bypass and the extension of the dissection in to the innominate artery we elected to...

utilize the two antegrade branches for the bi-lateral carotid branches and actually utilize the downgoing branch through the- for the right subclavian artery for later access to the thoracoabdominal aorta. On post op day one once again he presented with

an affective co arctation secondary to a kink within the previous surgical graft, sustaining a secondary intervention and a placement of a balloon expandable stent. Current status. On Unfortunately the result is not as fortunate

as the first case. In 15 months he presented with recurrent fevers, multi-focal CVAs from septic emboli. Essentially bacteria endocarditis and he was deemed inoperable and he died. So in conclusion.

Repair of complex arch pathologies is feasible with the 3-branch Relay arch branch device. Experience obviously is very limited. Proper patient selection important. And the third antegrade branch is useful for later thoracoabdominal access.

Thank you.

- Thank you Dr. Melissano for the kind interaction. TEVAR is the first option, or first line therapy for many pathologies of the thoracic aorta. But, it is not free from complications and two possible complications of the arch are the droop effect and the bird-beak. I was very interested as Gore came up with the new

Active Control System of the graft. The main features of this graft, of this deployment system are that the deployment is staged and controlled in putting in the graft at the intermediate diameter and then to the full diameter. The second important feature is that we can

optionally modify the angulation of the graft once the graft is in place. Was very, very interesting. This short video shows how it works. You see the graft at the intermediate diameter, we can modify the angulation also during this stage

but it's not really used, and then the expansion of the graft at the full diameter and the modification of the angulation, if we wished. This was one of the first cases done at our institution. A patient with an aneurysm after Type B dissection. You see the graft in place and you see the graft after

partial deployment and full deployment. Perhaps you can appreciate, also, a gap between the graft and the lesser curvature of the arch, which could be corrected with the angulation. As you can see here, at the completion angiography we have an ideal positioning of the graft inside the arch.

Our experience consisted only on 43 cases done during the last months. Mostly thoracic aneurysm, torn abdominal aneurysm, and patients with Type B aortic dissection. The results were impressive. No mortality, technical success, 100%,

but we had four cases with problems at the access probably due to the large bore delivery system as you can see here. No conversion, so far and no neurological injury in this patient group. We have some patients who came up for the six months follow-up and you see here we detected one Type 1b endoleak,

corrected immediately with a new graft. Type II endoleak which should be observed. This was our experience, but Gore has organized all the registry, the Surpass Registry, which is a prospective, single-arm, post market registry including 125 patients and all these patients

have been already included in these 20 centers in seven different countries in Europe. This was the pathology included, very thorough and generous, and also the landing zone was very different, including zone two down to zone five. The mean device used per patient were 1.3.

In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, the Active Control System of the well known CTAG is a really unique system to achieve an ideal positioning of the graft. We don't need to reduce the blood pressure aggressively during the deployment because of the intermediate diameter

reached and the graft angulation can be adjusted in the arch. But, it's not reversible. Thank you very much for your attention.



































- Thank you chairman, ladies and gentlemen. I have no disclosures on this topic. So first, in short, the clinical challenge that we confront, this is course entity. As we all know, the primary extracranial carotid artery aneurysm with various etiologies, and it's very nice intervention to perform on it,

very nice surgery and the vascular techniques, but the main question actually, that we have to answer, do we need to treat it at all? And as there is a lack of natural history, we started in 2014 a web-based international registry in which all patients with an extracranial

carotid aneurysm can be included, and we look for clinical and imaging follow up data from admission to 30 days and longer on. I want to give you today an update on status of the registry. So far we included 371 patients.

If you take in acceleration that in all data published so far is only 3,000 patients of which about the health is case reports, I think this is already a large achievement. We are moving on ahead. In the graph you can see that we are

have increasing inclusion rates, and we are little behind in data management. But this seems very promising. About half the patients are derived from the Netherlands thus far. And about half the patients are from

international contributors. About the patient characteristics, about two thirds is male, age is respectively younger as considered to atherosclerotic disease in the carotid territory, as may be expected. What is important on the other characteristics

is that the data are largely comparable between the national and international cohort. About the characteristics of the aneurysm itself, are also there a large comparison between the two cohorts, national and international. A bit more often in the proximal and common

carotid in the international cohorts, and that's probably related as more international patients have been operated on, I come to that in the next slides. Most relevantly, for a primary goal to report also on the natural course,

about half the patients included so far were asymptomatic and had a natural course follow up. About treatment strategies performed, again, large part of the patients are followed up in a conservative fashion. We have some data on endovascular or hybrid approach,

but the large part of the revascularization is primary surgery. And next, to our analysis of natural course follow up, of course we also report on our long term outcomes of surgical intervention. This is the overview of completion of follow up,

there's some work to do as you can see. We expect to report a preliminary results in early next year when the data on the first year follow up is complete for the current cohort. In the meantime, we have large data sets on imaging, therefore we performed already

some analysis on the exceptional tortuosity as we can often see in these cases. We compared four available software packages using two observers and two rounds to define a tortuosity index. And we actually found that for these four

commercially available packages, have all of them have an excellent intraobserver agreement and also agreement between the observer. So, all four of these can be used to perform further imaging. As also we are looking for semi automated

volume measurements to define a standardized follow up in these patients. So for now, I can confirm that the Carotid Aneurysm Registry is an ongoing and observational registry. I think it's the largest registry on ECAA

so far and still growing. I would advise you all today, also to contribute to this registry and you can see the e-mail address for further information update. Thank you for your attention.

- We are talking about the current management of bleeding hemodialysis fistulas. I have no relevant disclosures. And as we can see there with bleeding fistulas, they can occur, you can imagine that the patient is getting access three times a week so ulcerations can't develop

and if they are not checked, the scab falls out and you get subsequent bleeding that can be fatal and lead to some significant morbidity. So fatal vascular access hemorrhage. What are the causes? So number one is thinking about

the excessive anticoagulation during dialysis, specifically Heparin during the dialysis circuit as well as with cumin and Xarelto. Intentional patient manipulati we always think of that when they move,

the needles can come out and then you get subsequent bleeding. But more specifically for us, we look at more the compromising integrity of the vascular access. Looking at stenosis, thrombosis, ulceration and infection. Ellingson and others in 2012 looked at the experience

in the US specifically in Maryland. Between the years of 2000/2006, they had a total of sixteen hundred roughly dialysis death, due to fatal vascular access hemorrhage, which only accounted for about .4% of all HD or hemodialysis death but the majority did come

from AV grafts less so from central venous catheters. But interestingly that around 78% really had this hemorrhage at home so it wasn't really done or they had experienced this at the dialysis centers. At the New Zealand experience and Australia, they had over a 14 year period which

they reviewed their fatal vascular access hemorrhage and what was interesting to see that around four weeks there was an inciting infection preceding the actual event. That was more than half the patients there. There was some other patients who had decoags and revisional surgery prior to the inciting event.

So can the access be salvaged. Well, the first thing obviously is direct pressure. Try to avoid tourniquet specifically for the patients at home. If they are in the emergency department, there is obviously something that can be done.

Just to decrease the morbidity that might be associated with potential limb loss. Suture repairs is kind of the main stay when you have a patient in the emergency department. And then depending on that, you decide to go to the operating room.

Perera and others 2013 and this is an emergency department review and emergency medicine, they use cyanoacrylate to control the bleeding for very small ulcerations. They had around 10 patients and they said that they had pretty good results.

But they did not look at the long term patency of these fistulas or recurrence. An interesting way to kind of manage an ulcerated bleeding fistula is the Limberg skin flap by Pirozzi and others in 2013 where they used an adjacent skin flap, a rhomboid skin flap

and they would get that approximal distal vascular control, rotate the flap over the ulcerated lesion after excising and repairing the venotomy and doing the closure. This was limited to only ulcerations that were less than 20mm.

When you look at the results, they have around 25 AV fistulas, around 15 AV grafts. The majority of the patients were treated with percutaneous angioplasty at least within a week of surgery. Within a month, their primary patency was running 96% for those fistulas and around 80% for AV grafts.

If you look at the six months patency, 76% were still opened and the fistula group and around 40% in the AV grafts. But interesting, you would think that rotating an adjacent skin flap may lead to necrosis but they had very little necrosis

of those flaps. Inui and others at the UC San Diego looked at their experience at dialysis access hemorrhage, they had a total 26 patients, interesting the majority of those patients were AV grafts patients that had either bovine graft

or PTFE and then aneurysmal fistulas being the rest. 18 were actually seen in the ED with active bleeding and were suture control. A minor amount of patients that did require tourniquet for a shock. This is kind of the algorithm when they look at

how they approach it, you know, obviously secure your proximal di they would do a Duplex ultrasound in the OR to assess hat type of procedure

they were going to do. You know, there were inciting events were always infection so they were very concerned by that. And they would obviously excise out the skin lesion and if they needed interposition graft replacement they would use a Rifampin soak PTFE

as well as Acuseal for immediate cannulation. Irrigation of the infected site were also done and using an impregnated antibiotic Vitagel was also done for the PTFE grafts. They were really successful in salvaging these fistulas and grafts at 85% success rate with 19 interposition

a patency was around 14 months for these patients. At UCS, my kind of approach to dealing with these ulcerated fistulas. Specifically if they bleed is to use

the bovine carotid artery graft. There's a paper that'll be coming out next month in JVS, but we looked at just in general our experience with aneurysmal and primary fistula creation with an AV with the carotid graft and we tried to approach these with early access so imagine with

a bleeding patient, you try to avoid using catheter if possible and placing the Artegraft gives us an opportunity to do that and with our data, there was no significant difference in the patency between early access and the standardized view of ten days on the Artegraft.

Prevention of the Fatal Vascular Access Hemorrhages. Important physical exam on a routine basis by the dialysis centers is imperative. If there is any scabbing or frank infection they should notify the surgeon immediately. Button Hole technique should be abandoned

even though it might be easier for the patient and decreased pain, it does increase infection because of that tract The rope ladder technique is more preferred way to avoid this. In the KDOQI guidelines of how else can we prevent this,

well, we know that aneurysmal fistulas can ulcerate so we look for any skin that might be compromised, we look for any risk of rupture of these aneurysms which rarely occur but it still needs to taken care of. Pseudoaneurysms we look at the diameter if it's twice the area of the graft.

If there is any difficulty in achieving hemostasis and then any obviously spontaneous bleeding from the sites. And the endovascular approach would be to put a stent graft across the pseudoaneurysms. Shah and others in 2012 had 100% immediate technical success They were able to have immediate access to the fistula

but they did have around 18.5% failure rate due to infection and thrombosis. So in conclusion, bleeding to hemodialysis access is rarely fatal but there are various ways to salvage this and we tried to keep the access viable for these patients.

Prevention is vital and educating our patients and dialysis centers is key. Thank you.














- Thank you Mr Chairman, ladies and gentlemen. These are my disclosure. Open repair is the gold standard for patient with arch disease, and the gupta perioperative risk called the mortality and major morbidity remain not negligible.

Hybrid approach has only slightly improved these outcomes, while other off-the-shelf solution need to be tested on larger samples and over the long run. In this scenario, the vascular repair would double in the branch devices as emerging, as a tentative option with promising results,

despite addressing a more complex patient population. The aim of this multi-center retrospective registry is to assess early and midterm results after endovascular aortic arch repair. using the single model of doubling the branch stent graft in patient to fit for open surgery.

All patient are treated in Italy, with this technique. We're included in this registry for a total of 24 male patient, fit for open surgery. And meeting morphological criteria for double branch devices.

This was the indication for treatment and break-down by center, and these were the main end points. You can see here some operative details. Actually, this was theo only patient that did not require the LSA

re-revascularization before the endovascular procedure, because the left tibial artery rising directly from the aortic arch was reattached on the left common carotid artery. You can see here the large window in the superior aspect of the stent graft

accepting the two 13 millimeter in the branches, that are catheterized from right common carotid artery and left common carotid artery respectively. Other important feature of this kind of stent graft is the lock stent system, as you can see, with rounded barbs inside

the tunnels to prevent limb disconnection. All but one patient achieved technical success. And two of the three major strokes, and two retrograde dissection were the cause of the four early death.

No patient had any type one or three endoleak. One patient required transient dialysis and four early secondary procedure were needed for ascending aorta replacement and cervical bleeding. At the mean follow-up of 18 months,

one patient died from non-aortic cause and one patient had non-arch related major stroke. No new onset type one or three endoleak was detected, and those on standard vessel remained patent. No patient had the renal function iteration or secondary procedure,

while the majority of patients reported significant sac shrinkage. Excluding from the analysis the first six patients as part of a learning curve, in-hospital mortality, major stroke and retrograde dissection rate significant decrease to 11%, 11% and 5.67%.

Operative techniques significantly evolve during study period, as confirmed by the higher use of custom-made limb for super-aortic stenting and the higher use of common carotid arteries

as the access vessels for this extension. In addition, fluoroscopy time, and contrast median's significantly decrease during study period. We learned that stroke and retrograde dissection are the main causes of operative mortality.

Of course, we can reduce stroke rate by patient selection excluding from this technique all those patient with the Shaggy Aorta Supra or diseased aortic vessel, and also by the introduction and more recent experience of some technical points like sequentIal clamping of common carotid arteries

or the gas flushing with the CO2. We can also prevent the retrograde dissection, again with patient selection, according to the availability of a healthy sealing zone, but in our series, 6 of the 24 patients

presented an ascending aorta larger than 40 millimeter. And on of this required 48-millimeter proximal size custom-made stent graft. This resulted in two retrograde dissection, but on the other hand, the availability on this platform of a so large proximal-sized,

customized stent graft able to seal often so large ascending aorta may decrease the incidence of type I endoleak up to zero, and this may make sense in order to give a chance of repair to patients that we otherwise rejected for clinical or morphological reasons.

So in conclusion, endovascular arch repair with double branch devices is a feasible approach that enrich the armamentarium for vascular research. And there are many aspects that may limit or preclude the widespread use of this technology

with subsequent difficulty in drawing strong conclusion. Operative mortality and major complication rates suffer the effect of a learning curve, while mid-term results of survival are more than promising. I thank you for your attention.

- Thank you for asking me to speak. Thank you Dr Veith. I have no disclosures. I'm going to start with a quick case again of a 70 year old female presented with right lower extremity rest pain and non-healing wound at the right first toe

and left lower extremity claudication. She had non-palpable femoral and distal pulses, her ABIs were calcified but she had decreased wave forms. Prior anterior gram showed the following extensive aortoiliac occlusive disease due to the small size we went ahead and did a CT scan and confirmed.

She had a very small aorta measuring 14 millimeters in outer diameter and circumferential calcium of her aorta as well as proximal common iliac arteries. Due to this we treated her with a right common femoral artery cutdown and an antegrade approach to her SFA occlusion with a stent.

We then converted the sheath to a retrograde approach, place a percutaneous left common femoral artery access and then placed an Endologix AFX device with a 23 millimeter main body at the aortic bifurcation. We then ballooned both the aorta and iliac arteries and then placed bilateral balloon expandable

kissing iliac stents to stent the outflow. Here is our pre, intra, and post operative films. She did well. Her rest pain resolved, her first toe amputation healed, we followed her for about 10 months. She also has an AV access and had a left arterial steel

on a left upper extremity so last week I was able to undergo repeat arteriogram and this is at 10 months out. We can see that he stent remains open with good flow and no evidence of in stent stenosis. There's very little literature about using endografts for occlusive disease.

Van Haren looked at 10 patients with TASC-D lesions that were felt to be high risk for aorta bifem using the Endologix AFX device. And noted 100% technical success rate. Eight patients did require additional stent placements. There was 100% resolution of the symptoms

with improved ABIs bilaterally. At 40 months follow up there's a primary patency rate of 80% and secondary of 100% with one acute limb occlusion. Zander et all, using the Excluder prothesis, looked at 14 high risk patients for aorta bifem with TASC-C and D lesions of the aorta.

Similarly they noted 100% technical success. Nine patients required additional stenting, all patients had resolution of their symptoms and improvement of their ABIs. At 62 months follow up they noted a primary patency rate of 85% and secondary of 100

with two acute limb occlusions. The indications for this procedure in general are symptomatic patient with a TASC C or D lesion that's felt to either be a high operative risk for aorta bifem or have a significantly calcified aorta where clamping would be difficult as we saw in our patient.

These patients are usually being considered for axillary bifemoral bypass. Some technical tips. Access can be done percutaneously through a cutdown. I do recommend a cutdown if there's femoral disease so you can preform a femoral endarterectomy and

profundaplasty at the same time. Brachial access is also an alternative option. Due to the small size and disease vessels, graft placement may be difficult and may require predilation with either the endograft sheath dilator or high-pressure balloon.

In calcified vessels you may need to place covered stents in order to pass the graft to avoid rupture. Due to the poor radial force of endografts, the graft must be ballooned after placement with either an aortic occlusion balloon but usually high-pressure balloons are needed.

It usually also needs to be reinforced the outflow with either self-expanding or balloon expandable stents to prevent limb occlusion. Some precautions. If the vessels are calcified and tortuous again there may be difficult graft delivery.

In patients with occluded vessels standard techniques for crossing can be used, however will require pre-dilation before endograft positioning. If you have a sub intimal cannulation this does put the vessel at risk for rupture during

balloon dilation. Small aortic diameters may occlude limbs particularly using modular devices. And most importantly, the outflow must be optimized using stents distally if needed in the iliac arteries, but even more importantly, assuring that you've

treated the femoral artery and outflow to the profunda. Despite these good results, endograft use for occlusive disease is off label use and therefor not reimbursed. In comparison to open stents, endograft use is expensive and may not be cost effective. There's no current studies looking

into the cost/benefit ratio. Thank you.

- Thank you, Ulrich. Before I begin my presentation, I'd like to thank Dr. Veith so kindly, for this invitation. These are my disclosures and my friends. I think everyone knows that the Zenith stent graft has a safe and durable results update 14 years. And I think it's also known that the Zenith stent graft

had such good shrinkage, compared to the other stent grafts. However, when we ask Japanese physicians about the image of Zenith stent graft, we always think of the demo version. This is because we had the original Zenith in for a long time. It was associated with frequent limb occlusion due to

the kinking of Z stent. That's why the Spiral Z stent graft came out with the helical configuration. When you compare the inner lumen of the stent graft, it's smooth, it doesn't have kink. However, when we look at the evidence, we don't see much positive studies in literature.

The only study we found was done by Stephan Haulon. He did the study inviting 50 consecutive triple A patients treated with Zenith LP and Spiral Z stent graft. And he did two cases using a two iliac stent and in six months, all Spiral Z limb were patent. On the other hand, when you look at the iliac arteries

in Asians, you probably have the toughest anatomy to perform EVARs and TEVARs because of the small diameter, calcification, and tortuosity. So this is the critical question that we had. How will a Spiral Z stent graft perform in Japanese EIA landing cases, which are probably the toughest cases?

And this is what we did. We did a multi-institutional prospective observational study for Zenith Spiral Z stent graft, deployed in EIA. We enrolled patients from June 2017 to November 2017. We targeted 50 cases. This was not an industry-sponsored study.

So we asked for friends to participate, and in the end, we had 24 hospitals from all over Japan participate in this trial. And the board collected 65 patients, a total of 74 limbs, and these are the results. This slide shows patient demographics. Mean age of 77,

80 percent were male, and mean triple A diameter was 52. And all these qualities are similar to other's reporting in these kinds of trials. And these are the operative details. The reason for EIA landing was, 60 percent had Common Iliac Artery Aneurysm.

12 percent had Hypogastric Artery Aneurysm. And 24 percent had inadequate CIA, meaning short CIA or CIA with thrombosis. Outside IFU was observed in 24.6 percent of patients. And because we did fermoral cutdowns, mean operative time was long, around three hours.

One thing to note is that we Japanese have high instance of Type IV at the final angio, and in our study we had 43 percent of Type IV endoleaks at the final angio. Other things to notice is that, out of 74 limbs, 11 limbs had bare metal stents placed at the end of the procedure.

All patients finished a six month follow-up. And this is the result. Only one stenosis required PTA, so the six months limb potency was 98.6 percent. Excellent. And this is the six month result again. Again the primary patency was excellent with 98.6 percent. We had two major adverse events.

One was a renal artery stenosis that required PTRS and one was renal stenosis that required PTA. For the Type IV index we also have a final angio. They all disappeared without any clinical effect. Also, the buttock claudication was absorbed in 24 percent of patients at one month, but decreased

to 9.5 percent at six months. There was no aneurysm sac growth and there was no mortality during the study period. So, this is my take home message, ladies and gentlemen. At six months, Zenith Spiral Z stent graft deployed in EIA was associated with excellent primary patency

and low rate of buttock claudication. So we have most of the patients finish a 12 month follow-up and we are expecting excellent results. And we are hoping to present this later this year. - [Host] Thank you.

- Thank you. Here are my disclosures. Our preferred method for zone one TAVR has evolved to a carotid/carotid transposition and left subclavian retro-sandwich. The technique begins with a low transverse collar incision. The incision is deepened through the platysma

and subplatysmal flaps are then elevated. The dissection is continued along the anterior border of the sternocleidomastoid entering the carotid sheath anteromedial to the jugular vein. The common carotid artery is exposed

and controlled with a vessel loop. (mumbling) The exposure's repeated for the left common carotid artery and extended as far proximal to the omohyoid muscle as possible. A retropharyngeal plane is created using blunt dissection

along the anterior border of the cervical vertebra. A tunneling clamp is then utilized to preserve the plane with umbilical tape. Additional vessel loops are placed in the distal and mid right common carotid artery and the patient is systemically anticoagulated.

The proximal and distal vessel loops are tightened and a transverse arteriotomy is created between the middle and distal vessel loops. A flexible shunt is inserted and initially secured with the proximal and middle vessel loops. (whistling)

It is then advanced beyond the proximal vessel loop and secured into that position. The left common carotid artery is then clamped proximally and distally, suture ligated, clipped and then transected. (mumbling)

The proximal end is then brought through the retropharyngeal tunnel. - [Surgeon] It's found to have (mumbles). - An end-to-side carotid anastomosis is then created between the proximal and middle vessel loops. If preferred the right carotid arteriotomy

can be made ovoid with scissors or a punch to provide a better shape match with the recipient vessel. The complete anastomosis is back-bled and carefully flushed out the distal right carotid arteriotomy.

Flow is then restored to the left carotid artery, I mean to the right carotid artery or to the left carotid artery by tightening the middle vessel loop and loosening the proximal vessel loop. The shunt can then be removed

and the right common carotid artery safely clamped distal to the transposition. The distal arteriotomy is then closed in standard fashion and flow is restored to the right common carotid artery. This technique avoids a prosthetic graft

and the retropharyngeal space while maintaining flow in at least one carotid system at all times. Once, and here's a view of the vessels, once hemostasis is assured the platysma is reapproximated with a running suture followed by a subcuticular stitch

for an excellent cosmetic result. Our preferred method for left subclavian preservation is the retro-sandwich technique which involves deploying an initial endograft just distal to the left subclavian followed by both proximal aortic extension

and a left subclavian covered stent in parallel fashion. We prefer this configuration because it provides a second source of cerebral blood flow independent of the innominate artery

and maintains ready access to the renovisceral vessels if further aortic intervention is required in the future. Thank you.

- Thanks (mumbles) I have no disclosures. So when were talking about treating thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysms in patients with chronic aortic dissections, these are some of the most difficult patients to treat. I thought it would be interesting

to just show you a case that we did. This is a patient, you can see the CT scrolling through, Type B dissection starts pretty much at the left subclavian, aneurysmal. It's extensive dissection that involves the thoracic aorta, abdominal aorta,

basically goes down to the iliac arteries. You can see the celiac, SMA, renals at least partially coming off the true and continues all the way down. It's just an M2S reconstruction. You can see again the extent of this disease and what makes this so difficult in that it extends

from the entire aorta, up proximally and distally. So what we do for this patient, we did a left carotid subclavian bypass, a left external to internal iliac artery bypass. We use a bunch of thoracic stent grafts and extended that distally.

You can see we tapered down more distally. We used an EVAR device to come from below. And then a bunch of parallel grafts to perfuse our renals and SMA. I think a couple take-home messages from this is that clearly you want to preserve the branches

up in the arch. The internal iliac arteries are, I think, very critical for perfusing the spinal cord, especially when you are going to cover this much. And when you are dealing with these dissections, you have to realize that the true lumens

can become quite small and sometimes you have to accommodate for that by using smaller thoracic endografts. So this is just what it looks like in completion. You can see how much metal we have in here. It's a full metal jacket of the aorta, oops.

We, uh, it's not advancing. Oops, is it 'cause I'm pressing in it or? All right, here we go. And then two years post-op, two years post-op, you can see what this looks like. The false lumen is completely thrombosed and excluded.

You can see the parallel grafts are all open. The aneurysm sac is regressing and this patient was successfully treated. So what are some of the tips and tricks of doing these types of procedures. Well we like to come in from the axillary artery.

We don't perform any conduits. We just stick the axillary artery separately in an offset manner and place purse-string sutures. You have to be weary of manipulating around the aortic arch, especially if its a more difficult arch, as well as any thoracic aortic tortuosity.

Cannulating of vessels, SMA is usually pretty easy, as you heard earlier. The renals and celiac can be more difficult, depending upon the angles, how they come off, and the projection. You want to make sure you maintain a stiff wire,

when you do get into these vessels. Using a Coda balloon can be helpful, as sometimes when you're coming from above, the wires and catheters will want to reflux into that infrarenal aorta. And the Coda balloon can help bounce that up.

What we do in situations where the Coda doesn't work is we will come in from below and a place a small balloon in the distal renal artery to pin the catheters, wires and then be able to get the stents in subsequently. In terms of the celiac artery,

if you're going to stent it, you want to make sure, your wire is in the common hepatic artery, so you don't exclude that by accident. I find that it is just simpler to cover, if the collaterals are intact. If there is a patent GDA on CT scan,

we will almost always cover it. You can see here that robust collateral pathway through the GDA. One thing to be aware of is that you are going to, if you're not going to revascularize the celiac artery you may need to embolize it.

If its, if the endograft is not going to oppose the origin of the celiac artery in the aorta because its aneurysmal in that segment. In terms of the snorkel extent, you want to make sure, you get enough distal purchase. This is a patient intra-procedurally.

We didn't get far enough and it pulled out and you can see we're perfusing the sac. It's critical that the snorkel or parallel grafts extend above the most proximal extent of your aortic endograft or going to go down. And so we take a lot of care looking at high resolution

pictures to make sure that our snorkel and parallel grafts are above the aortic endograft. This is just a patient just about a year or two out. You can see that the SMA stent is pulling out into the sac. She developed a endoleak from the SMA,

so we had to come in and re-extend it more distally. Just some other things I mentioned a little earlier, you want to consider true lumen space preserve the internals, and then need to sandwich technique to shorten the parallel grafts. Looking at a little bit of literature,

you can see this is the PERCLES Registry. There is a number of type four thoracos that are performed here with good results. This is a paper looking at parallel grafting and 31 thoracoabdominal repairs. And you can see freedom from endoleaks,

chimney graft patency, as well as survival is excellent. This was one looking purely at thoracoabdominal aneurysm repairs. There are 32 altogether and the success rates and results were good as well. And this was one looking at ruptures,

where they found that there was a mean 20% sac shrinkage rate and all endografts remained patent. So conclusion I think that these are quite difficult to do, but with good techniques, they can be done successfully. Thank you.

- Good morning. I'd like to thank everybody who's in attendance for the 7 A.M. session. So let's talk about a case. 63 year old male, standard risk factors for aneurismal disease. November 2008, he had a 52 mm aneurism,

underwent Gore Excluder, endovascular pair. Follow up over the next five, relatively unremarkable. Sac regression 47 mm no leak. June 2017, he was lost for follow up, but came back to see us. Duplex imaging CTA was done to show the sac had increased

from 47 to 62 in a type 2 endoleak was present. In August of that year, he underwent right common iliac cuff placement for what appeared to be a type 1b endoleak. September, CT scan showed the sac was stable at 66 and no leak was present. In March, six months after that, scan once again

showed the sac was there but a little bit larger, and a type two endoleak was once again present. He underwent intervention. This side access on the left embolization of the internal iliac, and a left iliac limb extension. Shortly thereafter,

contacted his PCP at three weeks of weakness, fatigue, some lethargy. September, he had some gluteal inguinal pain, chills, weakness, and fatigue. And then October, came back to see us. Similar symptoms, white count of 12, and a CT scan

was done and here where you can appreciate is, clearly there's air within the sac and a large anterior cell with fluid collections, blood cultures are negative at that time. He shortly thereafter went a 2 stage procedure, Extra-anatomic bypass, explant of the EVAR,

there purulent fluid within the sac, not surprising. Gram positive rods, and the culture came out Cutibacterium Acnes. So what is it we know about this case? Well, EVAR clearly is preferred treatment for aneurism repair, indications for use h

however, mid-term reports still show a significant need for secondary interventions for leaks, migrations, and rupture. Giles looked at a Medicare beneficiaries and clearly noted, or at least evaluated the effect of re-interventions

and readmissions after EVAR and open and noted that survival was negatively impacted by readmissions and re-interventions, and I think this was one of those situations that we're dealing with today. EVAR infections and secondary interventions.

Fortunately infections relatively infrequent. Isolated case reports have been pooled into multi-institutional cohorts. We know about a third of these infections are related to aortoenteric fistula, Bacteremia and direct seeding are more often not the underlying source.

And what we can roughly appreciate is that at somewhere between 14 and 38% of these may be related to secondary catheter based interventions. There's some data out there, Matt Smeed's published 2016, 180 EVARs, multi-center study, the timing of the infection presumably or symptomatic onset

was 22 months and 14% or greater had secondary endointerventions with a relatively high mortality. Similarly, the study coming out of Italy, 26 cases, meantime of diagnosis of the infection is 20 months, and that 34.6% of these cases underwent secondary endovascular intervention.

Once again, a relatively high mortality at 38.4%. Study out of France, 11 institutions, 33 infective endographs, time of onset of symptoms 414 days, 30% of these individuals had undergone secondary interventions. In our own clinical experience of Pittsburgh,

we looked at our explants. There were 13 down for infection, and of those nine had multiple secondary interventions which was 69%, a little bit of an outlier compared to the other studies. Once again, a relatively high mortality at one year. There's now a plethora of information in the literature

stating that secondary interventions may be a source for Bacteremia in seeding of your endovascular graft. And I think beyond just a secondary interventions, we know there's a wide range of risk factors. Perioperative contamination, break down in your sterile technique,

working in the radiology suite as opposed to the operating room. Wound complications to the access site. Hematogenous seeding, whether it's from UTIs, catheter related, or secondary interventions are possible.

Graft erosion, and then impaired immunity as well. So what I can tell you today, I think there is an association without question from secondary interventions and aortic endograft infection. Certainly the case I presented appears to show causation but there's not enough evidence to fully correlate the two.

So in summary, endograft infections are rare fortunately. However, the incidence does appear to be subtly rising. Secondary interventions following EVAR appear to be a risk factor for graft infection. Graft infections are associated without question

a high morbidity and mortality. I think it's of the utmost importance to maintain sterile technique, administer prophylactic antibiotics for all secondary endovascular catheter based interventions. Thank you.

- This is from some work in collaboration with my good friend, Mike Dake. And, a couple of years of experience at Stanford now. First described by Kazy? years ago. This technical note of using multiple main-body endographs in a sandwich formation.

Up at the top but, then yielding multiple branches to get out to the visceral vessels and leaving one branch for a bifurcated graft. We've sort of modified it a little bit and generally either use multiple

grafts in order to create a branch the celiac and SMA. Left the celiac sometimes for a chimney, but the strategy really has been in one of the limbs to share both renals and the limb that goes down to the legs. We noticed early on that this really was not for

non-operative candidates, only for urgent cases and we recognize that the visceral branches were the most important to be in their own limb. I'll just walk you through a case. 6.8 centimeter stent for foraco above

the prior opened repair. The plan drawn out here with multiple main bodies and a second main body inside in order to create the multiple branches. The first piece goes in. It's balloon molded at the level of pulmonary

vein with enough length so that the ipsalateral limb is right next to the celiac. And we then, from above get into that limb and down into the celiac vessel and extend with either a limb or a viabahn. Next, we deploy a second main body inside

of the gate, thus creating now another two limbs to work through. And then through that, extend in its own branch a limb to the SMA. This was an eight by 79 vbx. Then we've got a third limb to go through.

We put a cuff that measures about 14. This is the math so that the double renal snorkle plus the main body fills up this hole. Now, double sheath access from above, looking for both renals. Sheaths out into both renals with viabahns

inside of that. Deployment of the bottom device and then a final angiogram with a little bit of a gutter that we often see when we have any kind of parallel graft configuration. Here's the post-op CT scan wherein

that limb is the two shared renals with the leg. This is the one year post-op with no endo leaks, successful exclusion of this. Here's another example of one of an eight and a half centimeter stent three thorico similar strategy, already with an occluded

celiac. Makes it a little bit easier. One limb goes down to the superior mesenteric artery and then the other limb then is shared again bilateral renals in the lower main body. Notice in this configuration you can get all the way up to the top then by putting a thoracic component

inside of the bifurcated subabdominal component. There's the final CT scan for that. We've spent some time looking at the different combinations of how these things will fill up to minimize the gutters through some more work. In collaboration with some friends in Kampala.

So we've treated 21 patients over the last couple of years. 73 years of age, 48 percent female usual comorbid factors. Oh, I thought I had more data there to show you. O.K. I thought this was a four minute talk.

Look at that. I'm on time. Octopus endovascular strategy is a feasible off the shelf solution for high risk patients that can't undergo open repair. You know obviously, sort of in this forum and coming to this meeting we see what's

available outside of the U.S. and I certainly am awaiting clinical trial devices that will have purpose specific teacher bi-graphs. The end hospital morbidity has still been high, at four percent. The one year survival of 71 percent in this select

group of 21 patients is acceptable. Paraplegia is still an issue even when we stage them and in this strategy you can stage them by just doing the top part plus the viscerals first and leaving the renals for another day. And branch patency thus far has been

in the short term similar to the purpose specific graft as well as with the parallel graft data. Thank you.

- Thank you Dr. Albaramum, it's a real pleasure to be here and I thank you for being here this early. I have no disclosures. So when everything else fails, we need to convert to open surgery, most of the times this leads to partial endograft removal,

complete removal clearly for infection, and then proximal control and distal control, which is typical in vascular surgery. Here's a 73 year old patient who two years after EVAR had an aneurism growth with what was thought

to be a type II endoleak, had coiling of the infermius mesenteric artery, but the aneurism continued to grow. So he was converted and what we find here is a type III endoleak from sutures in the endograft.

So, this patient had explantations, so it is my preference to have the nordic control with an endovascular technique through the graft where the graft gets punctured and then we put a 16 French Sheath, then we can put a aortic balloon.

And this avoids having to dissect the suprarenal aorta, particularly in devices that have super renal fixation. You can use a fogarty balloon or you can use the pruitt ballon, the advantage of the pruitt balloon is that it's over the wire.

So here's where we removed the device and in spite of the fact that we tried to collapse the super renal stent, you end up with an aortic endarterectomy and a renal endarterectomy which is not a desirable situation.

So, in this instance, it's not what we intend to do is we cut the super renal stent with wire cutters and then removed the struts individually. Here's the completion and preservation of iliac limbs, it's pretty much the norm in all of these cases,

unless they have, they're not well incorporated, it's a lot easier. It's not easy to control these iliac arteries from the inflammatory process that follows the placement of the endograft.

So here's another case where we think we're dealing with a type II endoleak, we do whatever it does for a type II endoleak and you can see here this is a pretty significant endoleak with enlargement of the aneurism.

So this patient gets converted and what's interesting is again, you see a suture hole, and in this case what we did is we just closed the suture hole, 'cause in my mind,

it would be simple to try and realign that graft if the endoleak persisted or recurred, as opposed to trying to remove the entire device. Here's the follow up on that patient, and this patient has remained without an endoleak, and the aneurism we resected

part of the sack, and the aneurism has remained collapsed. So here's another patient who's four years status post EVAR, two years after IMA coiling and what's interesting is when you do delayed,

because the aneurism sacks started to increase, we did delayed use and you see this blush here, and in this cases we know before converting the patient we would reline the graft thinking, that if it's a type III endoleak we can resolve it that way

otherwise then the patient would need conversion. So, how do we avoid the proximal aortic endarterectomy? We'll leave part of the proximal portion of the graft, you can transect the graft. A lot of these grafts can be clamped together with the aorta

and then you do a single anastomosis incorporating the graft and the aorta for the proximal anastomosis. Now here's a patient, 87 years old, had an EVAR,

the aneurism grew from 6 cm to 8.8 cm, he had coil embolization, translumbar injection of glue, we re-lined the endograft and the aneurism kept enlarging. So basically what we find here is a very large type II endoleak,

we actually just clip the vessel and then resected the sack and closed it, did not remove the device. So sometimes you can just preserve the entire device and just take care of the endoleak. Now when we have infection,

then we have to remove the entire device, and one alternative is to use extra-anatomic revascularization. Our preference however is to use cryo-preserved homograft with wide debridement of the infected area. These grafts are relatively easy to remove,

'cause they're not incorporated. On the proximal side you can see that there's a aortic clamp ready to go here, and then we're going to slide it out while we clamp the graft immediately, clamp the aorta immediately after removal.

And here's the reconstruction. Excuse me. For an endograft-duodenal fistula here's a patient that has typical findings, then on endoscopy you can see a little bit of the endograft, and then on an opergy I series

you actually see extravasation from the duodenal. In this case we have the aorta ready to be clamped, you can see the umbilical tape here, and then take down the fistula, and then once the fistula's down

you got to repair the duodenal with an omental patch, and then a cryopreserved reconstruction. Here's a TEVAR conversion, a patient with a contained ruptured mycotic aneurysm, we put an endovascular graft initially, Now in this patient we do the soraconomy

and the other thing we do is, we do circulatory support. I prefer to use ECMO, in this instances we put a very long canula into the right atrium, which you're anesthesiologist can confirm

with transassof forgeoligico. And then we use ECMO for circulatory support. The other thing we're doing now is we're putting antibiotic beads, with specific antibiotic's for the organism that has been cultured.

Here's another case where a very long endograft was removed and in this case, we put the device offline, away from the infected field and then we filled the field with antibiotic beads. So we've done 47 conversions,

12 of them were acute, 35 were chronic, and what's important is the mortality for acute conversion is significant. And at this point the, we avoid acute conversions,

most of those were in the early experience. Thank you.

- Thank you and thanks again Frank for the kind invitation to be here another year. So there's several anatomic considerations for complex aortic repair. I wanted to choose between fenestrations or branches,

both with regards to that phenotype and the mating stent and we'll go into those. There are limitations to total endovascular approaches such as visceral anatomy, severe angulations,

and renal issues, as well as shaggy aortas where endo solutions are less favorable. This paper out of the Mayo Clinic showing that about 20% of the cases of thoracodynia aneurysms

non-suitable due to renal issues alone, and if we look at the subset that are then suitable, the anatomy of the renal arteries in this case obviously differs so they might be more or less suitable for branches

versus fenestration and the aneurysm extent proximally impacts that renal angle. So when do we use branches and when do we use fenestrations? Well, overall, it seems to be, to most people,

that branches are easier to use. They're easier to orient. There's more room for error. There's much more branch overlap securing those mating stents. But a branch device does require

more aortic coverage than a fenestrated equivalent. So if we extrapolate that to juxtarenal or pararenal repair a branched device will allow for much more proximal coverage

than in a fenestrated device which has, in this series from Dr. Chuter's group, shows that there is significant incidence of lower extremity weakness if you use an all-branch approach. And this was, of course, not biased

due to Crawford extent because the graft always looks the same. So does a target vessel anatomy and branch phenotype matter in of itself? Well of course, as we've discussed, the different anatomic situations

impact which type of branch or fenestration you use. Again going back to Tim Chuter's paper, and Tim who only used branches for all of the anatomical situations, there was a significant incidence of renal branch occlusion

during follow up in these cases. And this has been reproduced. This is from the Munster group showing that tortuosity is a significant factor, a predictive factor, for renal branch occlusion

after branched endovascular repair, and then repeated from Mario Stella's group showing that upward-facing renal arteries have immediate technical problems when using branches, and if you have the combination of downward and then upward facing

the long term outcome is impaired if you use a branched approach. And we know for the renals that using a fenestrated phenotype seems to improve the outcomes, and this has been shown in multiple trials

where fenestrations for renals do better than branches. So then moving away from the phenotype to the mating stent. Does the type of mating stent matter? In branch repairs we looked at this

from these five major European centers in about 500 patients to see if the type of mating stent used for branch phenotype grafts mattered. It was very difficult to evaluate and you can see in this rather busy graph

that there was a combination used of self-expanding and balloon expandable covered stents in these situations. And in fact almost 2/3 of the patients had combinations in their grafts, so combining balloon expandable covered stents

with self expanding stents, and vice versa, making these analyses very very difficult. But what we could replicate, of course, was the earlier findings that the event rates with using branches for celiac and SMA were very low,

whereas they were significant for left renal arteries and if you saw the last session then in similar situations after open repair, although this includes not only occlusions but re-interventions of course.

And we know when we use fenestrations that where we have wall contact that using covered stents is generally better than using bare stents which we started out with but the type of covered stent

also seems to matter and this might be due to the stiffness of the stent or how far it protrudes into the target vessel. There is a multitude of new bridging stents available for BEVAR and FEVAR: Covera, Viabahn, VBX, and Bentley plus,

and they all seem to have better flexibility, better profile, and better radial force so they're easier to use, but there's no long-term data evaluating these devices. The technical success rate is already quite high for all of these.

So this is a summary. We've talked using branches versus fenestration and often a combination to design the device to the specific patient anatomy is the best. So in summary,

always use covered stents even when you do fenestrated grafts. At present, mix and match seems to be beneficial both with regards to the phenotype and the mating stent. Short term results seem to be good.

Technical results good and reproducible but long term results are lacking and there is very limited comparative data. Thank you. (audience applauding)

- These are my disclosures, as it pertains to this talk. FEVAR has become increasingly common treatment for juxtarenal aneurysm in the United States since it's commercial release in 2012. Controversy remains, however, with regard to stenting the SMA when it is treated with a single-wide, 10 mm scallop in the device.

You see here, things can look very similar. You see SMA treated with an unstented scallop on the left and one treated with the stented SMA on the right. It has been previously reported by Jason Lee that shuttering can happen with single-wide scallops of the SMA and in their experience

the SMA shuttering happens to different degree in patients, but is there in approximately 50% of the patients. But in his experience, the learning curve suggests that it decreases over time. At UNC, we use a selective criteria for stenting in the SMA. We will do a balloon test in the SMA,

as you see in the indication, and if the graft is not moved, then our SMA scallop is appropriate in line. If we have one scallop and one renal stent, its a high likelihood that SMA scallop will shift and change over time. So all those patients get stented.

If there is presence of pre-existing visceral stenosis we will stent the SMA through that scallop and in all of our plans, we generally place a 2 mm buffer, between the bottom edge of the scallop and the SMA. We looked over our results and 61 Zenith fenestrated devices performed over a short period of time.

We looked at the follow-up out up to 240 days and 40 patients in this group had at least one single wide scallop, which represented 2/3 of the group. Our most common configuration as in most practices is too small renal fenestrations and one SMA scallop.

Technically, devices were implanted in all patients. There were 27 patients that had scallops that were unstented. And 13 of the patients received stented scallops. Hospital mortality was one out of 40, from a ruptured hepatic artery aneurysm post-op.

No patients had aneurysm-related mortality to the intended treated aneurysm. If you look at this group, complications happen in one of the patients with stented SMA from a dissection which was treated with a bare metal stent extension at the time

of the initial procedure. And in the unstented patients, we had one patient with post-op nausea, elevated velocities, found to have shuttering of the graft and underwent subsequent stenting. The second patient had elevated velocities

and 20-pound weight loss at a year after his treatment, but was otherwise asymptomatic. There is no significant difference between these two groups with respect to complication risk. Dr. Veith in the group asked me to talk about stenting choice

In general, we use the atrium stent and a self-expanding stent for extension when needed and a fenestrated component. But, we have no data on how we treat the scallops. Most of those in our group are treated with atrium. We do not use VBX in our fenestrated cases

due to some concern about the seal around the supported fenestration. So Tips, we generally calculate the distance to the first branch of the SMA if we're going to stent it. We need to know the SMA diameter, generally its origin where its the largest.

We need to position the imaging intensifier orthogonal position. And we placed the stent 5-6 mm into the aortic lumen. And subsequently flare it to a 10-12 mm balloon. Many times if its a longer stent than 22, we will extend that SMA stent with a self-expanding stent.

So in conclusion, selective stenting of visceral vessels in single wide scallops is safe in fenestrated cases during this short and midterm follow-up if patients are carefully monitored. Stenting all single wide scallops is not without risk and further validation is needed

with multi-institution trial and longer follow-up

- So I'd like to thank Dr. Ascher, Dr. Sidawy, Dr. Veith, and the organizers for allowing us to present some data. We have no disclosures. The cephalic arch is defined as two centimeters from the confluence of the cephalic vein to either the auxiliary/subclavian vein. Stenosis in this area occurs about 39%

in brachiocephalic fistulas and about 2% in radiocephalic fistulas. Several pre-existing diseases can lead to the stenosis. High flows have been documented to lead to the stenosis. Acute angles. And also there is a valve within the area.

They're generally short, focal in nature, and they're associated with a high rate of thrombosis after intervention. They have been associated with turbulent flow. Associated with pre-existing thickening.

If you do anatomic analysis, about 20% of all the cephalic veins will have that. This tight anatomical angle linked to the muscle that surrounds it associated with this one particular peculiar valve, about three millimeters from the confluence.

And it's interesting, it's common in non-diabetics. Predictors if you are looking for it, other than ultrasound which may not find it, is calcium-phosphate product, platelet count that's high, and access flow.

If one looks at interventions that have commonly been reported, one will find that both angioplasty and stenting of this area has a relatively low primary patency with no really discrimination between using just the balloon or stent.

The cumulative patency is higher, but really again, deployment of an angioplasty balloon or deployment of a stent makes really no significant difference. This has been associated with residual stenosis

greater than 30% as one reason it fails, and also the presence of diabetes. And so there is this sort of conundrum where it's present in more non-diabetics, but yet diabetics have more of a problem. This has led to people looking to other alternatives,

including stent grafts. And in this particular paper, they did not look at primary stent grafting for a cephalic arch stenosis, but mainly treating the recurrent stenosis. And you can see clearly that the top line in the graph,

the stent graft has a superior outcome. And this is from their paper, showing as all good paper figures should show, a perfect outcome for the intervention. Another paper looked at a randomized trial in this area and also found that stent grafts,

at least in the short period of time, just given the numbers at risk in this study, which was out after months, also had a significant change in the patency. And in their own words, they changed their practice and now stent graft

rather than use either angioplasty or bare-metal stents. I will tell you that cutting balloons have been used. And I will tell you that drug-eluting balloons have been used. The data is too small and inconclusive to make a difference. We chose a different view.

We asked a simple question. Whether or not these stenoses could be best treated with angioplasty, bare-metal stenting, or two other adjuncts that are certainly related, which is either a transposition or a bypass.

And what we found is that the surgical results definitely give greater long-term patency and greater functional results. And you can see that whether you choose either a transposition or a bypass, you will get superior primary results.

And you will also get superior secondary results. And this is gladly also associated with less recurrent interventions in the ongoing period. So in conclusion, cephalic arch remains a significant cause of brachiocephalic AV malfunction.

Angioplasty, across the literature, has poor outcomes. Stent grafting offers the best outcomes rather than bare-metal stenting. We have insufficient data with other modalities, drug-eluting stents, drug-eluting balloons,

cutting balloons. In the correct patient, surgical options will offer superior long-term results and functional results. And thus, in the good, well-selected patient, surgical interventions should be considered

earlier in this treatment rather than moving ahead with angioplasty stent and then stent graft. Thank you so much.

- So this was born out of the idea that there were some patients who come to us with a positive physical exam or problems on dialysis, bleeding after dialysis, high pressures, low flows, that still have normal fistulograms. And as our nephrology colleagues teach us, each time you give a patient some contrast,

you lose some renal function that they maintain, even those patients who are on dialysis have some renal function. And constantly giving them contrasts is generally not a good thing. So we all know that intimal hyperplasia

is the Achilles Heel of dialysis access. We try to do surveillance. Debbie talked about the one minute check and how effective dialysis is. Has good sensitivity on good specificity, but poor sensitivity in determining

dialysis access problems. There are other measured parameters that we can use which have good specificity and a little better sensitivity. But what about ultrasound? What about using ultrasound as a surveillance tool and how do you use it?

Well the DOQI guidelines, the first ones, not the ones that are coming out, I guess, talked about different ways to assess dialysis access. And one of the ways, obviously, was using duplex ultrasound. Access flows that are less than 600

or if they're high flows with greater than 20% decrease, those are things that should stimulate a further look for clinical stenosis. Even the IACAVAL recommendations do, indeed, talk about volume flow and looking at volume flow. So is it volume flow?

Or is it velocity that we want to look at? And in our hands, it's been a very, very challenging subject and those of you who are involved with Vasculef probably have the same thing. Medicare has determined that dialysis shouldn't, dialysis access should not be surveilled with ultrasound.

It's not medically necessary unless you have a specific reason for looking at the dialysis access, you can't simply surveil as much as you do a bypass graft despite the work that's been done with bypass graft showing how intervening on a failing graft

is better than a failed graft. There was a good meta-analysis done a few years ago looking at all these different studies that have come out, looking at velocity versus volume. And in that study, their conclusion, unfortunately, is that it's really difficult to tell you

what you should use as volume versus velocity. The problem with it is this. And it becomes, and I'll show you towards the end, is a simple math problem that calculating volume flows is simply a product of area and velocity. In terms of area, you have to measure the luminal diameter,

and then you take the luminal diameter, and you calculate the area. Well area, we all remember, is pi r squared. So you now divide the diameter in half and then you square it. So I don't know about you,

but whenever I measure something on the ultrasound machine, you know, I could be off by half a millimeter, or even a millimeter. Well when you're talking about a four, five millimeter vessel, that's 10, 20% difference.

Now you square that and you've got a big difference. So it's important to use the longitudinal view when you're measuring diameter. Always measure it if you can. It peaks distally, and obviously try to measure it in an non-aneurysmal area.

Well, you know, I'm sure your patients are the same as mine. This is what some of our patients look like. Not many, but this is kind of an exaggerated point to make the point. There's tortuosity, there's aneurysms,

and the vein diameter varies along the length of the access that presents challenges. Well what about velocity? Well, I think most of us realize that a velocity between 100 to 300 is probably normal. A velocity that's over 500, in this case is about 600,

is probably abnormal, and probably represents a stenosis, right? Well, wait a minute, not necessarily. You have to look at the fluid dynamic model of this, and look at what we're actually looking at. This flow is very different.

This is not like any, not like a bypass graft. You've got flow taking a 180 degree turn at the anastomosis. Isn't that going to give you increased turbulence? Isn't that going to change your velocity? Some of the flow dynamic principles that are important

to understand when looking at this is that the difference between plug and laminar flow. Plug flow is where every bit is moving at the same velocity, the same point from top to bottom. But we know that's not true. We know that within vessels, for the most part,

we have laminar flow. So flow along the walls tends to be a little bit less than flow in the middle. That presents a problem for us. And then when you get into the aneurysmal section, and you've got turbulent flow,

then all bets are off there. So it's important, when you take your sample volume, you take it across the whole vessel. And then you get into something called the Time-Averaged mean velocity which is a term that's used in the ultrasound literature.

But it basically talks about making sure that your sample volume is as wide as it can be. You have to make sure that your angle is as normal in 60 degrees because once you get above 60 degrees, you start to throw it off.

So again, you've now got angulation of the anastomosis and then the compliance of a vein and a graft differs from the artery. So we use the two, we multiply it, and we come up with the volume flow. Well, people have said you should use a straight segment

of the graft to measure that. Five centimeters away from the anastomosis, or any major branches. Some people have actually suggested just using a brachial artery to assess that. Well the problems in dialysis access

is there are branches and bifurcations, pseudoaneurysms, occlusions, et cetera. I don't know about you, but if I have a AV graft, I can measure the volume flow at different points in the graft to get different numbers. How is that possible?

Absolutely not possible. You've got a tube with no branches that should be the same at the beginning and the end of the graft. But again, it becomes a simple math problem. The area that you're calculating is half the diameter squared.

So there's definitely measurement area with the electronic calipers. The velocity, you've got sampling error, you've got the anatomy, which distorts velocity, and then you've got the angle with which it is taken. So when you start multiplying all this,

you've got a big reason for variations in flow. We looked at 82 patients in our study. We double blinded it. We used a fistulagram as the gold standard. The duplex flow was calculated at three different spots. Duplex velocity at five different spots.

And then the diameters and aneurysmal areas were noted. This is the data. And basically, what it showed, was something totally non-significant. We really couldn't say anything about it. It was a trend toward lower flows,

how the gradients (mumbles) anastomosis, but nothing we could say. So as you all know, you can't really prove the null hypothesis. I'm not here to tell you to use one or use the other, I don't think that volume flow is something that

we can use as a predictor of success or failure, really. So in conclusion, what we found, is that Debbie Brow is right. Clinical examinations probably still the best technique. Look for abnormalities on dialysis. What's the use of duplex ultrasound in dialysis or patients?

And I think we're going to hear that in the next speaker. But probably good for vein mapping. Definitely good for vein mapping, arterial inflow, and maybe predicting maturation. Thank you very much.

- Thank you very much, Frank, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have no disclosure. Standard carotid endarterectomy patch-plasty and eversion remain the gold standard of treatment of symptomatic and asymptomatic patient with significant stenosis. One important lesson we learn in the last 50 years

of trial and tribulation is the majority of perioperative and post-perioperative stroke are related to technical imperfection rather than clamping ischemia. And so the importance of the technical accuracy of doing the endarterectomy. In ideal world the endarterectomy shouldn't be (mumbling).

It should contain embolic material. Shouldn't be too thin. While this is feasible in the majority of the patient, we know that when in clinical practice some patient with long plaque or transmural lesion, or when we're operating a lesion post-radiation,

it could be very challenging. Carotid bypass, very popular in the '80s, has been advocated as an alternative of carotid endarterectomy, and it doesn't matter if you use a vein or a PTFE graft. The result are quite durable. (mumbling) showing this in 198 consecutive cases

that the patency, primary patency rate was 97.9% in 10 years, so is quite a durable procedure. Nowadays we are treating carotid lesion with stinting, and the stinting has been also advocated as a complementary treatment, but not for a bail out, but immediately after a completion study where it

was unsatisfactory. Gore hybrid graft has been introduced in the market five years ago, and it was the natural evolution of the vortec technique that (mumbling) published a few years before, and it's a technique of a non-suture anastomosis.

And this basically a heparin-bounded bypass with the Nitinol section then expand. At King's we are very busy at the center, but we did 40 bypass for bail out procedure. The technique with the Gore hybrid graft is quite stressful where the constrained natural stint is inserted

inside internal carotid artery. It's got the same size of a (mumbling) shunt, and then the plumbing line is pulled, and than anastomosis is done. The proximal anastomosis is performed in the usual fashion with six (mumbling), and the (mumbling) was reimplanted

selectively. This one is what look like in the real life the patient with the personal degradation, the carotid hybrid bypass inserted and the external carotid artery were implanted. Initially we very, very enthusiastic, so we did the first cases with excellent result.

In total since November 19, 2014 we perform 19 procedure. All the patient would follow up with duplex scan and the CT angiogram post operation. During the follow up four cases block. The last two were really the two very high degree stenosis. And the common denominator was that all the patients

stop one of the dual anti-platelet treatment. They were stenosis wise around 40%, but only 13% the significant one. This one is one of the patient that developed significant stenosis after two years, and you can see in the typical position at the end of the stint.

This one is another patient who develop a quite high stenosis at proximal end. Our patency rate is much lower than the one report by Rico. So in conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, the carotid endarterectomy remain still the gold standard,

and (mumbling) carotid is usually an afterthought. Carotid bypass is a durable procedure. It should be in the repertoire of every vascular surgeon undertaking carotid endarterectomy. Gore hybrid was a promising technology because unfortunate it's been just not produced by Gore anymore,

and unfortunately it carried quite high rate of restenosis that probably we should start to treat it in the future. Thank you very much for your attention.

- Good morning everybody. Here are my disclosures. So, upper extremity access is an important adjunct for some of the complex endovascular work that we do. It's necessary for chimney approaches, it's necessary for fenestrated at times. Intermittently for TEVAR, and for

what I like to call FEVARCh which is when you combine fenestrated repair with a chimney apporach for thoracoabdominals here in the U.S. Where we're more limited with the devices that we have available in our institutions for most of us. This shows you for a TEVAR with a patient

with an aortic occlusion through a right infracrevicular approach, we're able to place a conduit and then a 22-french dryseal sheath in order to place a TEVAR in a patient with a penetrating ulcer that had ruptured, and had an occluded aorta.

In addition, you can use this for complex techniques in the ascending aorta. Here you see a patient who had a prior heart transplant, developed a pseudoaneurysm in his suture line. We come in through a left axillary approach with our stiff wire.

We have a diagnostic catheter through the femoral. We're able to place a couple cuffs in an off-label fashion to treat this with a technically good result. For FEVARCh, as I mentioned, it's a good combination for a fenestrated repair.

Here you have a type IV thoraco fenestrated in place with a chimney in the left renal, we get additional seal zone up above the celiac this way. Here you see the vessels cannulated. And then with a nice type IV repaired in endovascular fashion, using a combination of techniques.

But the questions always arise. Which side? Which vessel? What's the stroke risk? How can we try to be as conscientious as possible to minimize those risks? Excuse me. So, anecdotally the right side has been less safe,

or concerned that it causes more troubles, but we feel like it's easier to work from the right side. Sorry. When you look at the image intensifier as it's coming in from the patient's left, we can all be together on the patient's right. We don't have to work underneath the image intensifier,

and felt like right was a better approach. So, can we minimize stroke risk for either side, but can we minimize stroke risk in general? So, what we typically do is tuck both arms, makes lateral imaging a lot easier to do rather than having an arm out.

Our anesthesiologist, although we try not to help them too much, but it actually makes it easier for them to have both arms available. When we look at which vessel is the best to use to try to do these techniques, we felt that the subclavian artery is a big challenge,

just the way it is above the clavicle, to be able to get multiple devices through there. We usually feel that the brachial artery's too small. Especially if you're going to place more than one sheath. So we like to call, at our institution, the Goldilocks phenomenon for those of you

who know that story, and the axillary artery is just right. And that's the one that we use. When we use only one or two sheaths we just do a direct puncture. Usually through a previously placed pledgeted stitch. It's a fairly easy exposure just through the pec major.

Split that muscle then divide the pec minor, and can get there relatively easily. This is what that looks like. You can see after a sheath's been removed, a pledgeted suture has been tied down and we get good hemostasis this way.

If we're going to use more than two sheaths, we prefer an axillary conduit, and here you see that approach. We use the self-sealing graft. Whenever I have more than two sheaths in, I always label the sheaths because

I can't remember what's in what vessel. So, you can see yes, I made there, I have another one labeled right renal, just so I can remember which sheath is in which vessel. We always navigate the arch first now. So we get all of our sheaths across the arch

before we selective catheterize the visceral vessels. We think this partly helps minimize that risk. Obviously, any arch manipulation is a concern, but if we can get everything done at once and then we can focus on the visceral segment. We feel like that's a better approach and seems

to be better for what we've done in our experience. So here's our results over the past five-ish years or so. Almost 400 aortic interventions total, with 72 of them requiring some sort of upper extremity access for different procedures. One for placement of zone zero device, which I showed you,

sac embolization, and two for imaging. We have these number of patients, and then all these chimney grafts that have been placed in different vessels. Here's the patients with different number of branches. Our access you can see here, with the majority

being done through right axillary approach. The technical success was high, mortality rate was reasonable in this group of patients. With the strokes being listed there. One rupture, which is treated with a covered stent. The strokes, two were ischemic,

one hemorrhagic, and one mixed. When you compare the group to our initial group, more women, longer hospital stay, more of the patients had prior aortic interventions, and the mortality rate was higher. So in conclusion, we think that

this is technically feasible to do. That right side is just as safe as left side, and that potentially the right side is better for type III arches. Thank you very much.
















Thank you.

- So, my topic today is: Antegrade In Situ Fenestration for Fenestrated EVAR: How To Do It. Here are my disclosures. So, Jean Panneton has shown already the validity of retrograde laser fenestration. That is a feasible technique,

an effective option for acute thoracic pathology, with an excellent midterm patency, which it is very easy to do retrograde laser fenestration compared to an anterograde technique. We have done a lot of bench tests to perform all like this (mumbles).

So, the in situ laser fenestration technique is an off-label procedure. It is a bailout solution, and dedicated to emergent cases, patient unfit to open repair, or unfit to CMD device.

And we use this technique for left subclavian arch, and the anterograde technique for visceral arteries, and in a few cases of TEVAR. This is a technique. I use a Heli-FX 16 French. And I use

a 0.9 laser probe. We don't need to use another laser probe for this technique to avoid any larger hole. This is the steps for the technique. I do a primary stenting of the arteries using your effusion.

And then I do the endovascular exclusion. I position the steerable sheath at the level of the targeted artery and then do laser fenestration. This is a pre-stenting. And then the graft deployment

at the level of the seating zone. This was a type 1A endoleak after EVAR. The next step is to do the laser fenestration. You can see the tip of the laser probe. (Mumbles)

You could see the tip of the laser probe coming in the lumen of the SMA. And, we'll then, after this laser fenestration, quite easy, we'll then do

an enlargement of the ULL, using first a small cutting balloon and then do a progressive dilation using a bigger balloon, four millimeter, and then a six millimeter balloon.

The next step is to do, like, what we do for fenestrated cases, we do the bridging covered stent. Yeah, at the level of the SMA, and then the flairing, to have a good sealer

of the proximal part of the bridging stent. After the SMA, we then do the renal fenestration. And we used to stop with the celiac trunk. Our main indications are juxta para renal aneurysm, or type 1A Endoleak when there is a straight aorta. And in a few cases, thoracoabdominal aortic aneurysms.

This is an example of a type 1A endoleak, as I have presented. This is our first trial with 16 patients, treated on between three years. And we have now 29 patients with laser fenestration EVAR,

66 fenestrations, 5% of aortic aneurysm treated in our center. The median ischemic time is 12 minutes for the SMA, one hour for the renal arteries, and around two hours for the celiac trunk. The fenestration success rate is 95%.

Here are the outcomes. There was no mortality, even for very old patients. 16% of transitory dialysis. No spinal cord ischemia, one case of pneumonia, and the short follow-up of 22 months with 24 re-operations

in seven patients. Here are my conclusion. The laser fenestration EVAR must not be used for elective cases. In our strategy, the best options for urgent thoracoabdominal is to use

an off-the-shelf graft, like the T-branch. If a custom-made device graft is not available, the laser fenestration will be our reference treatment, and you don't need any brachial or axillary approach for this technique. Thank you very much.

- Our group has looked at the outcomes of patients undergoing carotid-subclavian bypass in the setting of thoracic endovascular repair. These are my obligatory disclosures, none of which are relevant to this study. By way of introduction, coverage of the left subclavian artery origin

is required in 10-50% of patients undergoing TEVAR, to achieve an adequate proximal landing zone. The left subclavian artery may contribute to critical vascular beds in addition to the left upper extremity, including the posterior cerebral circulation,

the coronary circulation if a LIMA graft is present, and the spinal cord, via vertebral collaterals. Therefore the potential risks of inadequate left subclavian perfusion include not only arm ischemia, but also posterior circulation stroke,

spinal cord ischemia, and coronary insufficiency. Although these risks are of low frequency, the SVS as early as 2010 published guidelines advocating a policy of liberal left subclavian revascularization during TEVAR

requiring left subclavian origin coverage. Until recently, the only approved way to maintain perfusion of the left subclavian artery during TEVAR, with a zone 2 or more proximal landing zone, was a cervical bypass or transposition procedure. As thoracic side-branch devices become more available,

we thought it might be useful to review our experience with cervical bypass for comparison with these newer endovascular strategies. This study was a retrospective review of our aortic disease database, and identified 112 out of 579 TEVARs

that had undergone carotid subclavian bypass. We used the standard operative technique, through a short, supraclavicular incision, the subclavian arteries exposed by division of the anterior scalene muscle, and a short 8 millimeter PTFE graft is placed

between the common carotid and the subclavian arteries, usually contemporaneous with the TEVAR procedure. The most important finding of this review regarded phrenic nerve dysfunction. To exam this, all pre- and post-TEVAR chest x-rays were reviewed for evidence of diaphragm elevation.

The study population was typical for patients undergoing TEVAR. The most frequent indication for bypass was for spinal cord protection, and nearly 80% of cases were elective. We found that 25 % of patients had some evidence

of phrenic nerve dysfunction, though many resolved over time. Other nerve injury and vascular graft complications occurred with much less frequency. This slide illustrates the grading of diaphragm elevation into mild and severe categories,

and notes that over half of the injuries did resolve over time. Vascular complications were rare, and usually treated with a corrective endovascular procedure. Of three graft occlusions, only one required repeat bypass.

Two pseudoaneurysms were treated endovascularly. Actuarial graft, primary graft patency, was 97% after five years. In summary then, the report examines early and late outcomes for carotid subclavian bypass, in the setting of TEVAR. We found an unexpectedly high rate

of phrenic nerve dysfunction postoperatively, although over half resolved spontaneously. There was a very low incidence of vascular complications, and a high long-term patency rate. We suggest that this study may provide a benchmark for comparison

with emerging branch thoracic endovascular devices. Thank you.

- [Nicos] Thanks so much. Good afternoon everybody. I have no disclosures. Getting falsely high velocities because of contralateral tight stenosis or occlusion, our case in one third of the people under this condition, high blood pressure, tumor fed by the carotid, local inflammation, and rarely by arteriovenous fistula or malformation.

Here you see a classic example, the common carotid, on the right side is occluded, also the internal carotid is occluded, and here you're getting really high velocity, it's 340, but if you visually look at the vessel, the vessel is pretty wide open. So it's very easy to see this discordance

between the diameter and the velocity. For occasions like this I'm going to show you with the ultrasound or other techniques, planimetric evaluation and if I don't go in trials, hopefully we can present next year. Another condition is to do the stenosis on the stent.

Typically the error here is if you measure the velocity outside the stent, inside the stent, basically it's different material with elastic vessel, and this can basically bring your ratio higher up. Ideally, when possible, you use the intra-stent ratio and this will give you a more accurate result.

Another mistake that is being done is that you can confuse the external with the internal, particularly also we found out that only one-third of the people internalized the external carotid, but here you should not make this mistake because you can see the branches obviously, but really, statistically speaking, if you take 100

consecutively occluded carotids, by statistical chance 99% of the time or more it will be not be an issue, that's common sense. And of course here I have internalization of the external, let's not confuse there too, but here we don't have any

stenosis, really we have increased velocity of the external because a type three carotid body tumor, let's not confuse this from this issue. Another thing which is a common mistake people say, because the velocity is above the levels we put, you see it's 148 and 47, this will make you with a grand criteria

having a 50% stenosis, but it's also the thing here is just tortuosity, and usually on the outer curve of a vessel or in a tube the velocity is higher. Then it can have also a kink, which can produce the a mild kink like this

on here, it can make the stenosis appear more than 50% when actually the vessel does have a major issue. This he point I want to make with the FMD is consistently chemical gradual shift, because the endostatin velocity is higher

than people having a similar degree of stenosis. Fistula is very rare, some of our over-diligent residents sometimes they can connect the jugular vein with roke last year because of this. Now, falsely low velocities because of proximal stenosis of

the Common Carotid or Brachiocephalic Artery, low blood pressure, low cardiac output, valve stenosis efficiency, stroke, and distal ICA stenosis or occlusion, and ICA recanalization. Here you see in a person with a real tight stenosis, basically the velocity is very low,

you don't have a super high velocity. Here's a person with an occlusion of the Common Carotid, but then the Internal Carotid is open, it flooded vessels from the external to the internal, and that presses a really tight stenosis of the external or the internal, but the velocities are low just because

the Common Carotid is occluded. Here is a phenomenon we did with a university partner in 2011, you see a recanalized Carotid has this kind of diameter, which goes all the way to the brain and a velocity really low but a stenosis really tight. In a person with a Distal dissection, you have low velocity

because basically you have high resistance to outflow and that's why the velocities are low. Here is an occlusion of the Brachiocephalic artery and you see all the phenomena, so earlier like the Common Carotid, same thing with the Takayasu's Arteritis, and one way I want to finish

this slide is what you should do basically when the velocity must reduce: planimetric evaluation. I'll give you the preview of this idea, which is supported by intracarotid triplanar arteriography. If the diameter of the internal isn't two millimeters, then it's 95% possible the value for stenosis,

regardless of the size of the Internal Carotid. So you either use the ICAs, right, then you're for sure a good value, it's a simple measurement independent of everything. Thank you very much.

- Thank you Mr. Chairman, good morning ladies and gentlemen. So that was a great setting of the stage for understanding that we need to prevent reinterventions of course. So we looked at the data from the DREAM trial. We're all aware that we can try

to predict secondary interventions using preoperative CT parameters of EVAR patients. This is from the EVAR one trial, from Thomas Wyss. We can look at the aortic neck, greater angulation and more calcification.

And the common iliac artery, thrombus or tortuosity, are all features that are associated with the likelihood of reinterventions. We also know that we can use postoperative CT scans to predict reinterventions. But, as a matter of fact, of course,

secondary sac growth is a reason for reintervention, so that is really too late to predict it. There are a lot of reinterventions. This is from our long term analysis from DREAM, and as you can see the freedom, survival freedom of reinterventions in the endovascular repair group

is around 62% at 12 years. So one in three patients do get confronted with some sort of reintervention. Now what can be predicted? We thought that the proximal neck reinterventions would possibly be predicted

by type 1a Endoleaks and migration and iliac thrombosis by configurational changes, stenosis and kinks. So the hypothesis was: The increase of the neck diameter predicts proximal type 1 Endoleak and migration, not farfetched.

And aneurysm shrinkage maybe predicts iliac limb occlusion. Now in the DREAM trial, we had a pretty solid follow-up and all patients had CT scans for the first 24 months, so the idea was really to use

those case record forms to try to predict the longer term reinterventions after four, five, six years. These are all the measurements that we had. For this little study, and it is preliminary analysis now,

but I will be presenting the maximal neck diameter at the proximal anastomosis. The aneurysm diameter, the sac diameter, and the length of the remaining sac after EVAR. Baseline characteristics. And these are the re-interventions.

For any indications, we had 143 secondary interventions. 99 of those were following EVAR in 54 patients. By further breaking it down, we found 18 reinterventions for proximal neck complications, and 19 reinterventions

for thrombo-occlusive limb complications. So those are the complications we are trying to predict. So when you put everything in a graph, like the graphs from the EVAR 1 trial, you get these curves,

and this is the neck diameter in patients without neck reintervention, zero, one month, six months, 12, 18, and 24 months. There's a general increase of the diameter that we know.

But notice it, there are a lot of patients that have an increase here, and never had any reintervention. We had a couple of reinterventions in the long run, and all of these spaces seem to be staying relatively stable,

so that's not helping much. This is the same information for the aortic length reinterventions. So statistical analysis of these amounts of data and longitudinal measures is not that easy. So here we are looking at

the neck diameters compared for all patients with 12 month full follow-up, 18 and 24. You see there's really nothing happening. The only thing is that we found the sac diameter after EVAR seems to be decreasing more for patients who have had reinterventions

at their iliac limbs for thrombo-occlusive disease. That is something we recognize from the literature, and especially from these stent grafts in the early 2000s. So conclusion, Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, CT changes in the first two months after EVAR

predict not a lot. Neck diameter was not predictive for neck-reinterventions. Sac diameter seems to be associated with iliac limb reinterventions, and aneurysm length was not predictive

of iliac limb reinterventions. Thank you very much.

- Thank you Professor Veith. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to present on behalf of my chief the results of the IRONGUARD 2 study. A study on the use of the C-Guard mesh covered stent in carotid artery stenting. The IRONGUARD 1 study performed in Italy,

enrolled 200 patients to the technical success of 100%. No major cardiovascular event. Those good results were maintained at one year followup, because we had no major neurologic adverse event, no stent thrombosis, and no external carotid occlusion. This is why we decided to continue to collect data

on this experience on the use of C-Guard stent in a new registry called the IRONGUARD 2. And up to August 2018, we recruited 342 patients in 15 Italian centers. Demographic of patients were a common demographic of at-risk carotid patients.

And 50 out of 342 patients were symptomatic, with 36 carotid with TIA and 14 with minor stroke. Stenosis percentage mean was 84%, and the high-risk carotid plaque composition was observed in 28% of patients, and respectively, the majority of patients presented

this homogenous composition. All aortic arch morphologies were enrolled into the study, as you can see here. And one third of enrolled patients presented significant supra-aortic vessel tortuosity. So this was no commerce registry.

Almost in all cases a transfemoral approach was chosen, while also brachial and transcervical approach were reported. And the Embolic Protection Device was used in 99.7% of patients, with a proximal occlusion device in 50 patients.

Pre-dilatation was used in 89 patients, and looking at results at 24 hours we reported five TIAs and one minor stroke, with a combined incidence rate of 1.75%. We had no myocardial infection, and no death. But we had two external carotid occlusion.

At one month, we had data available on 255 patients, with two additional neurological events, one more TIA and one more minor stroke, but we had no stent thrombosis. At one month, the cumulative results rate were a minor stroke rate of 0.58%,

and the TIA rate of 1.72%, with a cumulative neurological event rate of 2.33%. At one year, results were available on 57 patients, with one new major event, it was a myocardial infarction. And unfortunately, we had two deaths, one from suicide. To conclude, this is an ongoing trial with ongoing analysis,

and so we are still recruiting patients. I want to thank on behalf of my chief all the collaborators of this registry. I want to invite you to join us next May in Rome, thank you.
