Cardiac guide wire lawsuit

Mentioned descriptively rather than as a case study — Tom explains the femoral-artery / fluoroscopy / barium-tipped guide wire / stent procedure. Used as setup for the stiffness discussion.

One of you was working on micro-catheters? I should have brought my micro-catheter stainless steel piece. Does anyone have a parent or grandparent that has a stent in their heart? How do they get it in? They take one of the arteries in your leg, and they go in with this long stainless steel Teflon-coated tube or wire, and they're taking flash x-rays so they can see. They put a little bit of barium on the tip so they can see exactly where it is in your arteries. They're taking x-ray movies while they're doing this. This has been a great boon for the radiology doctors putting stents in. It used to be the surgeon did open-heart surgery. Now these guys do this much less invasive stuff. The first one they put in is a guide wire, and then they use that like a little trolley wire to bring other things in, and they eventually put the stent in.

Physical demonstration. Tom passes around a 25-year-old guide wire whose weld tip failed at less than 2.5 lb. 304 stainless, very fine coiled wire. Anchor for lawsuit anecdote (surgeon left 30 inches inside patient).

We're talking about stainless steels, and this is a guide wire. Has anybody ever had heart surgery? They come in through a big artery in your leg and snake these little stainless steel wires, teflon-coated, up through the vein. This is an old one, about twenty-five years old. The thing is very flexible at the tip. The surgeon takes it through the arteries, gets it where they need to go, and then they use it as sort of a transport rope to send other things up there — a balloon, a stent, whatever they want to put in your heart.