Ep. 692 Understanding Laser Atherectomy in Calcified Peripheral Artery Disease with Dr. Nicolas W. Shammas
46 min
Half or more of the femoropopliteal lesions Dr. Nicolas Shammas treats are moderately to severely calcified, the kind that turn a routine case into recoil, dissection, and a stent no one planned to place. On this episode of the BackTable Podcast, Dr. Neil Jain welcomes back Dr. Shammas, an interventional cardiologist in Davenport, Iowa, and president and research director of the Midwest Cardiovascular Research Foundation, to talk about laser atherectomy in heavily calcified peripheral artery disease (PAD). Dr. Shammas explains his workup with duplex, CT angiography, and intravascular ultrasound (IVUS), how decades of vessel prep trials shaped his device choices, and how a 355 nm laser with a very short pulse delivers enough power to cross calcium while limiting thermal injury beyond the catheter tip. --- Get the BackTable apphttps://www.backtable.com/app --- This podcast is supported by AngioDynamicsangiodynamics.com/cardiovascular --- Timestamps 00:00 - Introduction05:12 - Who Has Severely Calcified Femoropopliteal Disease?06:38 - Preprocedural Workup and Contrast Sparing08:40 - Access, IVUS, and the Evolution of Vessel Prep13:12 - How a 355 nm Laser Acts on Calcium16:32 - Safety: Embolization, Perforation, and Filters19:10 - Technique Tips: Speed, Sizing, and Opening Pressure21:51 - Comparing Laser Atherectomy and IVL in Calcified Femoropopliteal Disease28:58 - Why Residual Narrowing Matters for Patency30:34 - Study Limitations and the Need for Randomized Trials33:15 - Combining Laser Atherectomy and IVL39:36 - Treatment Sequence and Choosing a Device by Vessel Size41:53 - Final Takeaways --- More about this episode Dr. Shammas then shares the technique lessons that matter most for new operators, from passing the catheter at no more than a millimeter per second to sizing with IVUS and finding the balloon's opening pressure, and why he now rarely uses an embolic filter. The two discuss his recent core lab adjudicated, single-center comparison of laser at...