Cardiac Catheterization Program
The Cardiac Catheterization Program at UPMC is one of the largest and most experienced diagnostic and interventional cardiac catheterization programs in the United States.
Each year, our highly skilled specialists perform more than 16,000 diagnostic and interventional heart catheterization procedures.
About the procedure
Our specialists perform both elective and emergency catheterization procedures — inserting a catheter, or long tube, into a blood vessel and threading it to the patient’s heart.
Heart catheterization allows doctors to:
- evaluate chest pain
- identify narrowed or blocked arteries
- restore blood flow to threatened heart tissues, without surgery by:
- using the catheter to reopen the blocked artery
- holding it open with a small, meshwork collar called a stent
UPMC offers full heart catheterization services at these hospital locations:
Diagnostic-only cardiac catheterizations are offered at:
Conditions and treatments
Our state-of-the-art heart catheterization labs provide UPMC specialists with the most modern imaging technology to diagnose and treat cardiovascular diseases.
We also offer evaluation and treatment of:
- common heart conditions — chest pain (angina) and heart attack (myocardial infarction)
- the most difficult cases — requiring stents, intravascular ultrasound, distal embolic protection devices, rotational atherectomy, and optical coherence tomography (OCT), among many others
- valvular heart disease — offering catheter-based treatment with balloon valvuloplasty for people with mitral or aortic stenosis
- congestive heart failure
- life-threatening irregular heartbeats
- atrial septal defects
- patent foramen ovales — offering a nonsurgical option for treating congenital heart disease
- cardiomyopathy — offering a nonsurgical option for treating patients with hypertrophic cardiomyopathy with percutaneous septal ablation
- pericardial and myocardial diseases
- other diseases of the heart muscle and structures around the heart
Our labs are staffed around the clock with specialists in emergency catheterization for treating acutely ill patients, including many who arrive by helicopter from regional community hospitals.
Our interventional cardiologists routinely help in the treatment and evaluation of patients in the heart transplant program.
They have also begun an active program in treating peripheral arterial disease, including the treatment of:
- carotid artery disease
- renal artery disease
- lower extremity vascular disease
Innovations
- Our Cardiac Catheterization Program is one of the first in the country to use drug-coated stents, which release a drug into the blood-vessel wall that significantly decreases the likelihood of renarrowing.
- Our cardiologists also have developed a method to totally support heart function in critically ill patients without the use of surgery.
- We have a dedicated transradial cardiac catheterization program. In select patients, this approach allows for diagnostic and therapeutic cardiac catherization via the radial artery in the wrist, instead of the traditional leg approach.