Coronary bifurcations are frequent and account for approximately 20% of all percutaneous coronary interventions. Nonetheless, they remain one of the most challenging lesion subsets in interventional cardiology in terms of a lower procedural success rate and increased rates of long-term adverse cardiac events. Provisional side branch stenting should be the default approach in the majority of cases and we propose easily applicable and reproducible stepwise techniques associated with low risk of failure and complications.
Keywords: 2-stent techniques; bench testing; coronary bifurcation; provisional side branch stenting strategy; proximal stent optimization; wall shear stress.
Copyright © 2016 American College of Cardiology Foundation. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.