Surgical and minimally invasive treatments

Some conditions may be treated using catheters — thin, flexible, narrow tubes threaded through blood vessels to the heart — rather than traditional, invasive cardiothoracic surgery. Cardiac catheterization can be used to make repairs, like closing holes in the heart muscle or removing obstructions from the blood vessels, or to place stents in narrowed or blocked blood vessels to keep them open.

Children with an abnormal heart rhythm (an arrhythmia) can be treated with cardiac electrophysiology. Pediatric cardiac electrophysiology uses radiofrequency catheter ablation to treat cardiac arrhythmias, disrupting areas of the heart that are the source of the electrical irregularities.

Echocardiography can be combined with cardiac catheterization to implant a small medical device to treat infants with patent ductus arteriosus (PDA), a heart defect in which the ductus arteriosus, a blood vessel in the heart, does not close spontaneously after birth.

A thin catheter can be inserted into a blood vessel in the groin area and moved up into the heart guided by echo images to locate and close the PDA without the need for traditional angiography, which can pose more risks for infants.