Vascular Pathology and Interventional Treatments

Percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI) have dramatically changed the treatment of coronary artery disease in the past two decades. Before the era of PCI, patients continued to suffer from severe coronary artery disease such as angina pectoris while receiving medical therapy or had to undergo coronary artery bypass surgery (CABG) which required protracted hospital stay along with long recovery time. Today’s treatment options in this medical field comprise percutaneous interventional procedures including implantation of bare metal stent (BMS) or drug-eluting stent (DES) or use of drug-eluting balloons in the absence of a scaffolding device. Most often, these interventional procedures occur without any significant hospital stay. Alternatively, patients may undergo minimally invasive coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) or a hybrid procedure involving both surgical and interventional procedures. Despite the irresistible development of PCI, there remain inherent drawbacks of this technology that need thorough investigation in pathologic and clinical studies. In this chapter, we will focus on the pathology induced by different interventional procedures and the complication that may arise from their use.