Royal Philips today announced an important milestone in the evolving standard of care for treating patients with peripheral vascular disease: the establishment of the first-ever global consensus for the appropriate use of intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) in lower-extremity arterial and venous interventions.
Published in the August 2022 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Interventions, the new consensus document from 30 global vascular experts recommends routine use of IVUS as a preferred imaging modality in all phases in many peripheral vascular disease procedures.
“The voting panelists considered a variety of clinical scenarios and based on their extensive experience, arrived at a strong consensus,” said lead author Eric A. Secemsky, MD, from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. “They recommend routine use of IVUS as a preferred imaging modality in all phases for many peripheral interventions, both diagnostic and therapeutic, as it enables such exquisite visualization of the target vessel and lesion. Their recommendations, which withstood the rigor of peer review, can now be considered in the formulation of clinical guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of peripheral vascular disease.”
Peripheral vascular disease affects an estimated 200 million people worldwide, including approximately 40 to 45 million Americans, according to the American Heart Association. The authors noted that minimally invasive approaches for peripheral vascular disease interventions are increasingly common, but traditional imaging techniques like angiography have limitations, including two-dimensional projections of three-dimensional vasculature, which can complicate diagnosis and intraprocedural optimization.
Supported in part by research grants from Philips and Boston Scientific, the study was conducted and analyzed independently by Smith Center for Outcomes Research, gathering a wide spectrum of vascular expert opinion to ascertain the role of intravascular imaging in contemporary clinical practice.
