PROCEDURE NAMED FOR LOCAL CARDIOLOGIST

from Healthy Living January 2018

New year, new resolutions

A local interventional cardiologist is honored for creating an enhancement to a challenging procedure.

David C. Lew, MD, an interventional cardiologist and Chairman at Florida Heart & Vascular Multi Specialty Group, has accomplished a feat very few physicians can achieve—having a procedure named after him.

This distinction, called eponymous surgical procedures, was granted to Dr. Lew in November 2017. He presented his new technique to the TCT Cardiovascular Research Foundation’s conference in Denver, the largest, most widely recognized, and distinguished cardiovascular conference in the world. The procedure, forever to be known as the Lew-Schmidt technique, is an enhancement to the original Schmidt procedure.

Typically, an interventional cardiologist gains access to a leg vessel through a small puncture in the groin area. A catheter is inserted down the leg in the direction of the blood ﬂow to reach the occlusion. However, when the vessel is branched like a “Y” and the blockage is on one side immediately below the split penetrating the obstruction is nearly impossible because the catheter always follows the path of least resistance—the uncongested side branch.

The original Schmidt procedure gained access to the leg artery from the thigh, traveling up the leg against blood flow, finding the occlusion from the opposite direction. Very few interventional cardiologists even attempted this delicate and intricate technique. But what if the vessel you are using to access the blockage was previously fixed with a

Whereas the Schmidt procedure involves deploying the catheter in a healthy artery to reach the blockage, Dr. Lew perfected the technique to reach the occlusion through a previously stented vessel, and the new technique now is the Lew-Schmidt procedure.

“I am so honored to have a but to know this technique will be used to save limbs and enhance the lives of people all over the world is truly humbling.”

Indeed, being the first do something is not new to Dr. Lew. As the founding medical director of LRMC’s Heart Institute, he was the first to bring interventional cardiology to Lake County more than 25 years ago; first in the nation to offer Stellarex®, a drug-coated balloon, in an outpatient lab enviroment; first in the region to utilize the TRYTON® Side Branch Stent; and also one of 12 accomplished cardiologists in the US to first perform successful cardiac angioplasty and stents in patients presenting with an acute heart attack to a hospital without open heart facilities as part of PAMI-No S.O.S trial in the mid 90’s.