Crossing Occluded Blood Vessels – With Ease

An innovative device utilizes a technique known as "vibrational angioplasty” to open arteries with chronic total occlusion (CTO).

The POLAR (Path Of Least Arterial Resistance) CTO device is a mechanical tool that generates reciprocal and lateral movements at the distal end of standard guidewires with frequencies of 16 to 100 Hz, when passed through an angioplasty balloon catheter. In one study, 78 patients with chronic total occlusions of over three months duration that were resistant to conventional techniques were treated with the POLAR device using a variety of standard guidewires. The study found that lesions were successfully crossed in 67 (85.9%) of these cases and antegrade flow was reestablished in 59 (75.5%) patients. The POLAR CTO device is a product of Medical Miracles (Leeds, UK), and it has received the European Community CE marking. Hatch Medical (Duluth, GA, USA), a medical device incubator and technology brokerage firm focused on assisting physician inventors with novel concepts for minimally invasive medical devices, has announced that it has entered into an agreement with Medical Miracles to broker the device.

"We are pleased to be working with Medical Miracles' POLAR device and believe that it provides an efficacious and cost-effective solution to this chronic clinical challenge,” said Paul Gianneschi, managing principal of Hatch Medical.

Percutaneous interventions (PI) of a CTO remains one of the more difficult technical challenges for interventional practitioners, despite the progress made in the field of PI in the past decade. It has been estimated that CTOs are found in one-third of patients with significant vascular disease. Failure to revascularize a CTO often leaves the patient with either the more invasive option of bypass graft surgery or continuing medical therapy, which may or may not control their symptoms.


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