Interventional treatment of coronary heart disease and peripheral vascular disease.

Diagnostic Catheter Procedures In 1958, Mason Sones and his colleagues developed selective coronary angiography and published it as an abstract in Circulation.2 As a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic, he performed angiography of the aortic root in a patient with valvular heart disease. Looking directly into the x-ray beam, as was customary in the era before image intensifiers coupled to television systems (Figure 1), Sones recognized that the catheter had inadvertently slipped into the right coronary artery. The patient had transient asystole but no ventricular fibrillation. The high-quality picture of the right coronary artery obtained ushered in the era of selective coronary angiography. Sones subsequently refined this technique for routine use through a cut-down of the brachial artery. In parallel, Kurt Amplatz3 and Melvin Judkins4 further developed the technique using a femoral approach made possible by the Seldinger technique, introduced in 1953.5