Coronary Angiography
Coronary angiography, also called coronary catheterisation, is an invasive procedure to study the coronary artery anatomy using a special X-ray machine. By getting access to the artery from the groin or wrist, a thin and long catheter can be delivered to the heart to study the heart arteries by injecting iodine based contrast in order to understand the cause of the disease and plan for appropriate treatment.

The Goal of Coronary Angiography

• To obtain heart artery pictures to understand the presence and extent of heart artery blockages.
• To evaluate the most appropriate treatment for the heart artery blockages such as by means of percutaneous coronary intervention (also called coronary angioplasty with balloon or stent) or coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG).

Coronary Angioplasty
Also known as percutaneous coronary intervention, Coronary Angioplasty is a treatment to unblock the narrowed or blocked artery by means of balloon and/or stent in order to improve the blood flow to the affected heart muscle.

During invasive coronary procedures, some adjunctive devices that are available in our laboratory may be required for diagnosis or management of certain type of diseases.

1. Fractional Flow Reserve (FFR):
   This is an invasive technique used in cardiac catheterisation by delivering a special angioplasty wire into the coronary artery and measure the pressure difference before and after the stenosis in order to determine if a suspected narrowing is likely to cause impaired blood flow to the heart muscle.
2. Intravascular ultrasound (IVUS):
   This is a medical imaging technique to examine the blood vessel from inside by inserting a specially designed catheter with a tiny ultrasound probe attached to the end of the catheter.
3. Optical coherence tomography (OCT):
   This is an imaging technique by using a specially designed catheter which can emit low-coherence near-infrared light source. The imaging technique can provide a detailed study of the target heart vessel from inside the artery to help diagnose coronary artery disease and plan for appropriate treatment.

Your doctor may refer you for right heart catheterisation to further determine heart pumping function, severity of heart valve disease, pulmonary artery pressure or presence of certain congenital heart disease.

In this procedure, a special catheter was advanced to the right heart chambers and pulmonary artery through appropriate venous access such as neck or groin veins. Measure of pressure and/or oxygenation saturations thus can be obtained to provide necessary information of the condition of certain heart diseases.